


The Reaped

by slightlykylie



Category: Hunger Games (2012), Hunger Games Series - All Media Types, Hunger Games Trilogy - Suzanne Collins
Genre: F/F, F/M, Gen, M/M, canonical character deaths
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-12-03
Updated: 2013-02-14
Packaged: 2017-11-20 05:23:53
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 24
Words: 40,384
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/581738
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/slightlykylie/pseuds/slightlykylie
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Twenty-four vignettes, one for the life and death of each tribute in the Seventy-Fourth Hunger Games.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Glimmer [District 1 Female]

 

GLIMMER

_District 1 female tribute, killed by tracker jackers on day 5_

Glimmer needs to stay pretty.

“So you’ll be using a bow and arrow,” Cashmere says at their first mentoring session, sounding bored. “You’ll need to --“

“No, hold on. The sword’s my weapon,” Glimmer interrupts. “I’ve been training with it for --“

Cashmere brushes this off, impatient. “I don’t care. You’re using a bow and arrow from here on out. Start training.”

“But why can’t I --“

“This is not a debate. Get that straight right off,” Cashmere tells her curtly. “You’re here for your looks. Your job is to stay out of close combat. You lose an eye or break your nose and you’ve got no sponsors. Got it?”

“I’m not just here for my looks!” Glimmer protests, flushing, trying not to picture herself one-eyed with her nose a shapeless pulpy mess. “I’m really good with a sword, I --“

“If we were picking for combat skill we’d have gone with Paillette. We’re letting you volunteer because we picked for combat the last three years and lost every time. We’re leaving the combat up to Two this year. You'll need to be competent, of course. From now on you’re in training with a bow and arrow three hours a day. You and I’ll work on presentation another two hours daily. No more questions. Let’s talk about your hair."

Glimmer studies Cashmere’s face, the high cheekbones, the full lips, the sparkle in her eyes (glitter implanted by the Capitol) and thinks: _I hate you._

But she learns her lesson. The next day she goes into training with the bow and arrow, then -- Cashmere having gotten a tipoff that there'll be woods in the arena this year -- learns how to make hair conditioner out of wildflowers steeped in boiling water.

And she gets pretty good at both things and any number of others, until the boob job in the Capitol throws off her shooting. Apparently Cashmere hadn’t thought of that. Well, she hadn’t been picked for her brains either. Glimmer takes shot after shot in training when she hopes no one's looking, trying to keep her arm from catching on the new protrusion of flesh as she pulls back, trying to keep her shots from swerving left. It isn't working. She wonders if she should defy Cashmere, go back to the sword, but in the arena Cato claims the one sword at the Cornucopia and that's that. Cato is not big on sharing.

And so Glimmer loses the kill on 6M to Palometa, and 9M to Clove. The miss on 12F is pure embarrassment, but at least Cato can't get her either. How is Glimmer supposed to shoot clinging to a tree, anyway? In daylight, shooting from a better position -- she's already scouted out a better fork in the tree -- it will work. Glimmer wants that kill.

So she falls asleep to dream of perfect shooting, of throats opened precisely at the jugular and spouting blood, of skulls cloven by arrows, leaking brains. They’re good dreams. And while she sleeps, her hair waves lush around her face, a soft flush touches her cheeks, a strategic tear in her uniform reveals a teasing sample of ivory skin on the swell of her breast. The camera lingers on her lovingly. Cashmere receives calls from a few more sponsors.

But she wakes up to tracker jackers. And soon, Glimmer isn’t pretty anymore.

 


	2. Marvel [District 1 Male]

MARVEL

_District One male tribute, killed by Katniss’ arrow on day 9_

 

Every night in the arena Marvel dreams of Diamond, and it has to stop.

 

Diamond: a rock-hard name for the softest of boys.  When there’s a spider in his house, Diamond traps it in a cup and lets it out outside. If one of the boys picks a fight with him, he curls in fetal position to protect his face and stomach and waits for the other boy to get tired. When the electors went around collecting names for the prospective volunteers list, Diamond was one of three boys in tenth year who didn’t put his name down.  One of the others is retarded, the second one still bedridden from a near-fatal bout of measles.

 

 _Fag. Homo. Cocksucker. Pussy._ Those are just a few of the names the other guys call Diamond. Diamond flushes and pulls his head down, his shoulders forward, and doesn’t answer. Marvel would like to punch every one of those guys out, but he can’t.  Someone might suspect.

 

Marvel doesn’t talk to Diamond at school, and Diamond doesn’t seem to expect it -- or if he does, he keeps it to himself.  It’s in the grove of fruit trees behind Diamond’s house that Marvel lets himself go.  They pick the fruit for Diamond’s parents but spoil a good amount of it throwing them at each other, laughing and swearing when the overripe ones burst and the juice stains their clothes.  Sometimes they play tag there, like eight-year-old boys.  They lie on the ground watching the sunlight sift through the trees.

 

When they first kissed it was deep in the boughs of a flowering cherry tree.  Marvel will never forget the scent of it, the rough bark against his back, the patches of sunlight burnishing Diamond’s hair to bronze.  The softness and sweetness of Diamond’s lips on his.

 

Diamond doesn't want Marvel to sign up for the Games.  Marvel thinks he's crazy.

 

“What the hell do you think I’ve been training my ass off for?” he asks, time after time.  “I’ve been in Career track since I was six.  Do you even know what you’re saying?”

 

Every time but one, Diamond mumbles something about not wanting to lose him.

 

“Thanks for the vote of confidence,” Marvel snaps, and turns away.  And as the Games grow closer and Diamond’s pleas become more frequent -- “you can still back out, right up until the reaping, they can go with Julius, we could still get the win --“  the time they spend together begins to spoil.  Diamond’s kisses become more desperate.  Marvel feels something inside him shriveling up, growing hard and small as a peach pit.  It’s getting harder to switch back and forth from tribute to lover.  When he closes his eyes in Diamond’s arms he sees swords flashing in a duel. When he throws a spear through a dummy’s heart, Diamond’s features flash across the blank face of the dummy.  It’s getting muddled. With less than a month to the reaping, Marvel can’t afford that.  He begins training late into the evening, trying not to think of Diamond waiting dumbly beneath the pear tree.

 

And then a week and a half before the reaping, Diamond asks Marvel a new question. And when Marvel turns away,  he swears it will be the last time.

 

The day of the reaping, as Marvel stands on the stage, holding himself stiff and straight as an oak tree, his eye catches Diamond’s for a split second.  They look away from each other immediately, each unable to bear the expression in the other’s eyes. Marvel snaps his head around and crosses to the Justice Building without a glance backward.  He envisions his sword slicing through the bond between him and Diamond, severing it for good.

 

But days later, in the arena, he dreams of Diamond.  In his dreams they hold hands, Diamond’s calluses from constant tree-climbing rough against Marvel’s smoother palm.  He feels Diamond’s lips against his in that cherry tree.  He sees Diamond’s face above his as he begins to move against Marvel, need and vulnerability and dazzled love commingled.

 

And, even worse than the images of Diamond, Marvel sees himself, the way he is with Diamond. Reaching for Diamond’s hand around the curve of a tree. Curled in long grass, their foreheads touching.  Wrapping his legs around Diamond’s back. Worst of all, he sees brief moments of kindness, moments in which Marvel shared. The oranges they left on Ebony’s desk after her mother died. The rabbit with the broken leg that they’d tried to fix together.

 

So Marvel dreams of the oranges and the rabbit, and the trees, and cherry blossoms drifting slowly down.  But his dreams always seem to end with that last split-second look in Diamond’s eyes, and the last thing Diamond ever said to him, the thing that made Marvel turn on his heel and refuse to say goodbye.

 

_Why do you want --_

 

A few days into the Games, Marvel still has just one kill, from the Cornucopia, and bad as that is, it's made worse by the circumstances. Palometa only managed one Cornucopia kill too, but at least that was a kill from behind. 9F had somehow gotten hold of a mace, and she'd have killed Marvel if Marvel hadn't killed her. Self-defense doesn’t play as well as ambush with an audience impressed by ruthlessness, and Marvel knows the cheap shit he's been getting from sponsors is the result. He needs more kills. Ambush kills. But then at night Marvel dreams the expression Diamond would wear, seeing it all on television, and it wakes him up, sweating, like a nightmare.

 

_Why do you want --_

 

Marvel polishes the head of his spear, sharpens it with a rock. He focuses everything in him on the weapon.  He hardens his determination until it’s as razor-sharp and deadly as the spearhead.

 

One kill.  Self-defense.

 

One easy shot at 7F, bungled.  Marvel flushes hot when he remembers Cato’s laugh.

 

_Why do you want --_

 

Building comradery with Cato, Clove, Glimmer, Palometa.  Trying to ignore the fact that he really kind of hates them all.  Coming across a cherry tree in the woods.  Stumbling away from it, backing into the undergrowth.  Spearing a rabbit for cover, as though he’d gone hunting. Thinking of the other rabbit, the one they’d tried to save. _This isn’t okay. Forget him. You’ll never win if you think like this. Forget him._

 

On the last day that Marvel is in the arena, the Careers decide to split up for awhile, try to get a broader sense of the arena and who’s hiding where. As he hikes through the woods, Marvel works hard to hone his mind until there’s nothing left but hunger for blood. He avoids the cherry tree and snaps his eyes back and forth from ground to tree trunks to branches against the sky, searching for other tributes.  His spear is at the ready, a net slung over his shoulder.  He is ready to kill.

 

When he sees the little girl from 11 heading toward him his heart gives a painful lunge.  He ducks behind a tree.  She hasn’t seen him.  She’s coming closer.  She’s easy pickings.

 

_God, why does it have to be the little girl?  Why, out of all of them –_

 

_She’s not a little girl.  She’s a tribute.  She’s meat._

_She’s_ twelve _–_

 

_She’s dead._

_Twelve._

_Dead!_

 

Marvel’s mind is a shrieking wilderness now, his hand damp on his spear.  The girl is about ten yards away.  If he doesn’t act now this will all go south.  He needs to do it now.  _Now._

 

Diamond’s face crowds into his thoughts, his eyes wide, an expression of tortured intensity on his face, his last question on his lips.

 

_Why do you want to kill?_

 

Seven yards away.  Marvel’s hand closes on the net on his shoulder.

 

_Why do you want to kill?_

 

He pushes Diamond’s face away with a wild shove.  He pulls up his mentor’s hands on a net in training, showing him how to throw it.

 

_Why do you want to kill?_

He slings the net to the ground directly in front of the girl.  Something has distracted her – a birdcall?  That second's distraction is all it takes.

 

_Why do you want to kill?_

 

The net pulls taut.  The girl screams.

 

_Why do you want to kill?_

 

He throws the spear.

 

_Why do you want to kill?_

 

Blood.  A tiny child on the ground, writhing.  He thinks of the rabbit.

 

_Why do you want to kill?_

 

A crashing in the underbrush.  Blood on his shoe. His mind goes blank.

 

The arrow enters his neck, and he’s gone.

 

Back at home, Diamond stares at the picture on the television set, his face a crumpled cloth.  

 

Marvel’s death hurts him much less than what came just before it. 


	3. Clove [District 2 Female]

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This chapter contains implied rape and strong language.

CLOVE

_District 2 female tribute, killed by Thresh on day 13_

 

Clove enters the Hunger Games with a single purpose burning through her:

 

_Kill Cato._

 

Clove’s never liked Cato anyway – never liked his smug overconfidence and ridiculous ego, never liked how he assumes the world will always lay itself out for him like a red carpet.  Clove’s trained two hours a day ever since the day she turned six; in the last year she’s been given the killing of three convicted thieves, and sunk her knife into the heart from twenty feet each time for an instant kill. Cato actually missed the kill on one of the felons they gave him, and another one took twenty minutes to die.  He’s huge and strong and an obvious sociopath, but he’d never believe that he might have to take a second shot to finish a kill.  The time that he missed the kill on the illicit gem dealer from the mines, he argued with the officials for twenty minutes about whether the guy was “as good as dead” or not.  No, Clove’s never liked Cato.

 

But she wouldn’t have killed him until he destroyed her little sister.

 

Clove had never liked that situation to begin with.  What was a seventeen-year-old doing dating thirteen-year-olds? Diana wasn’t the first young girl Cato had gone after, but she was the smallest of them and probably the most naïve.   But the day he asked her out, Diana was so excited she couldn’t talk about anything else.  Clove couldn’t bear to bring her down – and, anyway, what was she so afraid of? So Cato was drawn to Diana -- who wouldn't be? With those emerald chips of eyes and her giggle like birdsong, Diana doesn't belong in District Two; she's like a little woodland elf. When Diana had burst out with her news, her date with that year's boy tribute, Clove looked at her little sister's flushed, shining face and knew she'd never be able to bring herself to darken that expression. So she let Diana go with a kiss on the cheek for luck. _She'll be fine,_ Clove told herself. _Nothing is going to happen._

 

But that night, Diana came back with eyes blank as glass and a button missing off her shirt. She went to bed without saying a word, but not before Clove had seen the smear of blood on her thigh. Clove knew then that that was what she’d been afraid of. 

 

She thought he might not even know he’d done anything wrong. If he wanted to fuck Diana, he’d never have thought to ask what she wanted.   He probably never even heard her say no.  No matter. He will die at Clove’s hands.

 

She’s planned it all out.  After two-thirds of the other tributes have died she’ll plant a knife in his gut, placed to cause the worst pain and the slowest death possible.  She wants desperately to cut his balls off but at first she wasn’t sure how to do that without putting the rest of the citizens of Two off.  So she practices swiping at one of the anatomically correct dummies over and over – late at night, so no one could see – until she’s mastered slicing off its balls, apparently by accident, on the upswing to the death blow in the stomach.

 

When the Games open, the hardest part is pretending to be on Cato’s side. She’s a little bit thrown when he saves her life at the Cornucopia, taking out some shit-district asshole who’d somehow learned a little bit about throwing a spear in training. But that was just for the alliance, Clove tells herself.  It doesn’t mean anything.

 

The days slip by and the tribute numbers are declining.  Clove’s not that happy with her allies in general.  Tack was probably the best of them, honestly, and he’s gone the first day.  Glimmer’s at least twice as stupid as Cato, which is saying something.  Marvel seems like he’s in a daze half the time. Palometa’s a whiny little cunt.  The kid from Three, of course, isn’t worth shit once the mines are done.  Much as she hates to admit it, Cato’s probably the best left after Tack’s dead.

 

Doesn't matter. Clove’s hands still itch to kill him.

 

Ten days in, Clove and Cato are the only Careers left. Eighteen dead overall, four left to kill. Clove keeps watch without giving much thought anymore to killing Cato in his sleep.  That was never the plan anyway, she reminds herself.

 

The 11 boy’s the only thing standing between her and Cato’s killing, she decides.  That jig’s big enough that it’ll probably take both of them to take him down. After they kill him, Clove will take out Cato.

 

They begin searching the grass together on day 11.  Cato kills a mutt snake that was headed for Clove.  Clove’s the first to notice a swarm of insects ten feet off that look like oversized locusts but could probably strip the flesh from your body in two minutes flat.  They know they should hunt in silence, but the silent grass is eerie enough that they can’t stop themselves from talking.  Cato’s imitation of the Six girl’s death throes has Clove in stitches every time.

 

If Clove thinks of Diana – the blank look that still hasn't totally left her eyes, the ten pounds she’s lost in three weeks, the sound of her weeping late at night -- it hardens her resolve.  She makes herself think of Diana often.

 

And then there’s the announcement about the change in rules.  The change that will allow both of them to live.

 

And why is she on the brink of tears to think she can keep him?  What has happened to her in these Games that she can’t bear to think of being left on her own with her hatred and fear, aloneness cutting her to the bone?  Relief floods her like warm liquor and when Cato lifts her in a bear hug her arms wrap around his back in return.  What has she become?

 

 _I’m sorry, Diana,_ she thinks.  _I can’t._  


	4. Cato [District 2 Male]

CATO

_District Two male tribute, killed by Katniss on day 18_

 

Cato sees Clove lying on the ground and it makes no sense.  She’s lying on the ground with a rock the size of a baby beside her head, but the pieces of the picture don’t quite add up.  Why is Thresh over there and not at the other side of the Cornucopia where Cato was waiting for him?  Why is the 12 girl running away instead of being sliced up by Clove? Why is Clove on the ground? Why is she making that noise?  

 

Why is he terrified?

 

He’s kneeling beside her and she’s moaning and her face is the color of tile grout but it doesn’t matter, there’s no blood, so she’s not dying, she’s not, no one dies without any blood. He’s babbling feverishly, holding her hand, she can’t die because he’s holding her hand.  He’ll hold her here so she can’t die.  And she can’t die because he’s telling her so, telling her she can’t die, they’ve been together all this time and she trusts him so if he tells her not to die she can’t die.  “Clove.  Clove. “  His hand is wet now, there’s blood on it, there wasn’t blood before, how can there be blood? He sees it’s coming from her ear, his hand was next to her ear and she’s bleeding from her ear, so that’s okay, no one dies from bleeding from their ear -- “You can’t leave me, Clove, you can’t leave, you can’t leave me –“  There’s hair stuck to her face over one eye, he pushes it aside so she can open her eyes, if she opens her eyes she won’t die – “ _Please_ don’t leave me, Clove, _please_ , Clove, _please,_ you can’t, you have to stay, oh God Clove if you leave me I can’t, I can’t anymore, you can’t die –“ There’s blood over her eye, blood from his hand, he wipes it away with his sleeve so she can open her eyes and come back to him.

 

He hears her trying to say words with the moans.  She’s trying to say his name.  “Ca…” The effort seems to wrack her and she chokes, coughing and convulsing and gasping for breath.  He tries to raise her head so she can breathe easier and his hand grazes across her temple and she screams, so he stops doing that.  Her head flops to one side and she’s moaning again.

 

“No,” he tells her, not babbling anymore, his voice firm and clear.  “No.  You’re not dying.”

 

Her eyes flutter open for a second.  He whoops out a crazy-sounding laugh. She won’t die now, he knows it.

 

“Cato.” She gets the word out that time, with another wet cough.  Cato’s starting to cry because she’s not dying after all.

 

“You’re okay,” he tells her. “See, you’re okay.”

 

“Don’t leave,” she manages.

 

“No.  No.  You can’t leave either,” he tells her, which is unnecessary because she’s going to be fine now, but he can’t stop saying it.  “Don’t die.”

 

Her hand contracts over his, holding tight.  Cato feels his hand in hers and realizes he loves her.

 

 _Love_.  He can’t think of the last time he loved somebody but he realizes he loves her. When did it start?  It feels like forever, now.  He loved her when she was eight and they started combat classes together.  He loved her when she was ten and they were in a swordfighting competition and they were the finalists and the final battle lasted six hours before he finally managed to slice her across the gut.  He loved her when she tackled him and began pummeling him for that. He loved her when she made more kills than he did at the execution test and he hated her, he loved her when she landed a weighted plastic knife in his back in training and laughed when he turned on her and he hated her,  he loved her all the times he thought he hated her, how could he ever have thought he hated her?   He loved her when she made five kills at the Cornucopia – _five!_ The record is seven! – he loved her when she pinned the district 8 girl for him to kill, he loved her when she shoved him away from the locust swarm, he loved her when she talked to him for a half an hour before the feast to nail down the details of how she’d cut the Twelve girl up.  He loves her because she knows all these things, she knows what it’s like to pare your soul down with a sword blade or a knife until all you know is killing, she knows what it’s like in the Games, these Games, the Seventy-Fourth Hunger Games, the Games where they stalked together and laughed together and killed together.

 

He’ll marry her, he decides, when they go back home. He’ll marry her and spend the rest of his life with the only person who knows him.  They will be the only pair ever to survive the Games together, and he’ll hold her for the rest of his life.

 

She’s moaning more softly now.  That’s good, it means the pain is getting better, it means she’s coming back.  Maybe they can even hunt Thresh together.  He rips his backpack off and begins pawing through it feverishly, throwing everything everywhere, looking for the sterile cloths so he can bind up her head and they can hunt together again.

 

“Cato.”  It’s a whisper now.  He leans closer to hear.

 

“Kill him,” she whispers.

 

“Yes.  We’ll kill him together.”

 

“No.”  She tries to shake her head; it flops to the side again.  “You have to. Kill him.”

 

“With you, Clove.  Please.  With you.”

 

“No.  Promise.”

 

“I promise,” Cato says, not that sure what he’s promising, because why would he have to promise?  They’ll do it together. “Promise,” he says again, and strokes her forehead. 

 

“But stay,” she says suddenly, and her hand tightens convulsively on his.  “I need you.”

 

“I need you too,” he tells her.

 

She lets out a long, rattling gasp, and lies still.  She’s passed out, he thinks.  That’s good.  She was in a lot of pain before.  A cannon fires, which is good news; must be the Five girl, must have been taken out by Thresh. Maybe it held Thresh up a little bit, killing her.  He throws a frantic look at the rise over which Thresh disappeared, knowing Thresh is now getting farther away with every moment, but he’ll leave quite a trail, crashing through the grass, and Cato can’t leave Clove.  So he does things for her, so she’ll be in less pain when she wakes up.  He folds a blanket and puts it under her head so it’s off the rocky ground.  He bandages her head with a sterile cloth, being as gentle around the dent as he possibly can, but she doesn’t cry out again.  He strokes her hair.  He whispers to her, tells her that when she wakes up they’ll hunt Thresh together, tells her they’ll leave the Games soon, tells her they'll get married and be happy forever.  She lies still, calm.  After awhile he looks for a pulse, and he can’t find one, but what does he know about it, really?  He never paid attention to that stuff in training.  He just focused on the killing.

 

He can’t find a pulse, but it doesn’t matter.  He can’t see her chest moving, but that doesn’t matter either.  He lays his head on her chest, listening for her heartbeat, and can’t hear one.  Doesn’t matter.  She can’t be dead.  _Clove is not dead._

 

It takes him a half an hour to believe that she’s gone.  He doesn’t want to move, ever.

 

But.  _Promise me._

_Kill him._

_Promise._

 

He stumbles to his feet and sets out for the grass, death and murder throbbing through his brain.

 


	5. Cerc [District 3 Male]

 

CERC

_District 3 male tribute, killed by Cato on day 8_

As Cato shoves Cerc in front of him as they head into the woods, Cerc thinks: _Tonight’s the night I’ll do it._

No.  His mind squirms and kicks, trying to avoid naming what he will do.  But he has to name it, or how will he ever carry it through?  So he thinks: _Tonight is the night they will die._

No.  Still not right.

 

_Tonight is the night I will kill them._

That’s it.

 

Beetee did warn him of this, he knows.  The moment Cerc was chosen, Beetee made a special request to mentor him.  Since the few surviving victors in District 3 usually try desperately to get out of mentoring, unwilling to take on the burden of working closely with a child who will almost certainly be dead in a week or two, Beetee’s request was surprising.  But he was firm.  “I heard you’re the smartest student in your grade,” Beetee said, and  Cerc nodded a bit, embarrassed.  “Good,” Beetee says.  “You might make it, then. I’d like to help.”

 

In every spare second between that day and the Games, Beetee worked with Cerc, teaching him how to deactivate mines and activate them again.

 

For the first few days, their discussion was limited to working out how Cerc will convince the Careers that they’re better off with him than without him.  Cerc couldn’t do it alone; the Careers would never have trusted him.  So during Cerc’s training session, Beetee met time after time with the Careers’ mentors, convincing them that Cerc does know how to reactivate the mines.  Eventually they believed him.  They all know what Beetee can do.

 

But it took several days for Cerc to understand that learning how to work the mines wasn’t all about getting in with the Careers . It wasn’t until then that Beetee let him in on the fact that It’s not just about living.  It’s also about killing.

 

At first Cerc didn’t know if he could do it.

 

“I thought I was just going to stay with them until a lot of tributes are… gone, and then run away.”

 

But Beetee shook his head . “I’m sorry, but that’s not a workable plan.  You don’t know when they’ll turn on you.  Once those mines are set up around their supplies, you’ll be disposable to them, I’m afraid.”  Beetee’s eyes were sympathetic, but unflinching. “I wouldn’t have asked to mentor you if I didn’t think you could do this,” he added.

 

Cerc wasn’t sure that was a compliment.  He sat there with Beetee, struggling to find words for what he was feeling.

 

“I just… want to hide,” he said eventually, then flushed, ashamed of himself for some obscure reason.

 

“I know,” Beetee said.  “Believe me, I know.”  There was a pause.  Cerc stared unhappily at the ground.

 

“It is easier this way,” Beetee said eventually.

 

“Easier than what?” Cerc asked, eyes still trained on the floor.

 

“Easier to do it at a distance. Set the mines.” He sighed a bit.  “Drop the wire.”

 

It took Cerc a second to figure out what Beetee was talking about. When he realized, he looked up at Beetee with sudden fellow feeling.  Beetee knows what it’s like.  Beetee was not going to let him go through this alone.

 

In the present, in the Games, Cato clamps a hand on Cerc’s shoulder, shoving him ahead. “Walk, dammit,” he says. Staggering forward, Cerc makes himself focus on Cato’s hand, its hard grip on his shoulder, pushing him into danger.  Because that’s why he’s with them, of course.  If they run into danger, Cerc will be the first victim, giving the Careers the chance to get away.  Cerc knows that this means he is already disposable.  If he doesn’t do it tonight, they’ll kill him in his sleep soon.  The bruises that Cato is leaving on his shoulder right now with that heavy grip contain that promise. And Cerc needs that right now.

 

For the last four nights, each time he was on watch while the rest slept, Cerc has disabled and dug up one mine. Tonight he will bury each of them in shallow dirt next to the remaining Careers’ sleeping bags.  There are three Careers left.  Four bombs will allow him to put one on each side of each of the Careers.  They will die, and he will live.  He will kill them, and he will live.

 

So he thinks about this, plots it, works through the details in his mind as he stumbles ahead of the Careers, hoping desperately that they won’t run into anything that will kill him today.  Today is all he needs.

 

And then there’s the noise, the deep, earth-shaking noise, the noise – Cerc comes to understand, reluctantly – of an explosion. He turns his head in time to see the plume of fire rising from their camp, the blooming bursts of flame marking each new blast.  For a moment he stands transfixed – what’s happening?  How can this be happening?  The mines can’t set one another off, he plotted their positions out too carefully, so how can he be seeing, hearing, feeling each of these new blasts?  And – oh, _shit_ – Cerc realizes one second late what this will mean for him.  He pivots and sets his feet to run pell-mell in the opposite direction, but he’s too late, Cato has him again, has him by the arm this time, pulling him as he stumbles, literally dragging him across the uneven ground when he falls.  Cerc’s head hits stones, branches, tree trunks, and he prays to black out, but he doesn’t.  He opens his mouth, trying to choke on dirt and rocks and pine needles, trying to die on his own terms before Cato can do it on his, but all his coughing and choking don’t kill him after all.  After that he just prays it will be quick. 

 

In those last moments Cerc knows that all his fears about killing the others were nonsense.  He could kill every single one of them in a heartbeat now.  He could kill anyone at all, he could kill everyone in this arena, if it meant he could live himself.

 

But he can’t.

 

In his last moment, his final prayer is answered, but he is too dead to appreciate it. 


	6. Diode [District 3 Female]

DIODE

_District 3 female tribute, killed at the Cornucopia on the first day_

 

Once Diode's gotten away from the Cornucopia, she knows she's going to be okay.

 

There was a moment of fear when she ran in for the fishing tackle and heard Clove’s knife whistling toward her as she set back out for the woods, but Clove missed, for once, and as Diode makes the edge of the woods she knows it was the right choice. She’d never make it through on just plants.  Diode has the means to survive now, and in fact, the Games seem to pass quick as a blink.  Fishing and gathering greens and berries, staying out of the way of the other tributes; she never even sees any of them. When she wins, it seems like a foregone conclusion. All the Capitol celebrations upon her win are a blur. The cheering crowds, the fancy dresses, the endless sessions with her prep team, doing her makeup and painting her nails and dyeing her hair.  To be honest, she’s not a big fan of the hair dye – it’s a strange shade of scarlet, and the dye seems to leave her hair sticky even when it’s been washed.  But it’s no matter. The first thing she really knows is when she goes home.

 

Home's even more beautiful than she remembered.  The tight rows of factories and labs, which she remembers as so numerous and close that they blocked out the sun, seem to have been changed in her honor.  Everywhere she looks she sees trees and dirt and grass bathed in sunlight. When she hugs her family on her return, she feels the miracle of all that’s happened to her for the first time.  When her family sees her hair they laugh about it together, much harder and longer than it merits, overflowing with the joy of Diode's return.

 

And Watt.  The first moment she sees him, she's filled with a kind of love she'd never thought she'd feel for him.  They wind up making love for the first time within a few moments of her return, under one of the new trees on the outskirts of the district.  She does it lying face-down, which is a position she'd never even imagined before, but it's wonderful.  Afterward he kisses her near the top of her hairline, and she sees that his lips come away with some of the sticky hair dye on them.  It looks like he’s wearing bright red lipstick.  They laugh together about it again, about how the Capitol, as rich and beauty-obsessed as it is, can’t come up with a better hair dye than this.  Diode feels trickles of it running down the side of her face now as she lies on the ground, still prone.  But Watt brushes it away with such tenderness that she’s flooded with love for him all over again – love and a sense of comfort and safety she never expected to feel again after her name was called at the reaping – and they make love again. It isn’t as good this time – Diode is beginning to feel the dirt against her face, the little stones cutting into her cheek, and at one point Watt slips and the ring he always wears cuts into the back of her head, causing a flash of pain.  But when he finishes and lies beside her, whispering love into her ear, none of it matters.

 

Watt asks Diode to marry him, and they have the wedding on her eighteenth birthday, under the trees where they first made love. Soon they have children, two boys and a girl. They’re more beautiful than Diode could ever have imagined,  playing in the backyard, running and dancing and laughing, and she’s unprepared for the depth of love she feels for them.  She watches them through the back window, the small blonde girl and the two brown-haired boys, wiping the running crimson dye off her face constantly.  She wants to go out and play with them, but the headache that she got when Watt pierced the back of her head with his ring has never gone away, so she goes out and lies on the ground instead, face-down, listening to them giggle as they chase one another around.  Once again she’s feeling dirt on her face, dirt that’s getting sticky now from the thick bloodred liquid leaking from her hair, and the same rocks pressing into her cheeks.  She tries to lift her head to watch the children, but she can’t quite manage it.  For the first time she notices the strange coppery smell coming from the puddle her face is now lying in.  She hitches her body forward a bit, trying to get out of the puddle, but her headache is so bad now.  The children seem to have wandered away for the moment, and there’s nothing but Diode and some trees and dirt and rock and the growing copper-smelling pool of red surrounding her.  The children have run away.  Diode’s alone under the trees. The pain in her head.  Red, sticky dirt on her face. The pain in her head. Chips of rock biting into her cheek.  The pain in her head.  The red pool.  Pain.  Red. 

 

And Watt.  Disappeared. The children.  Lost.  Her children, the children she loves more than her own life, lost.

_No,_ she thinks frantically, her head splitting.  _No.  I won’t lose the children.  I won’t._  She conjures up images of them, the sweet blonde girl, the shouting, rambunctious boys.  If she closes her eyes, they will come back, they’ll surround her. She can already hear their laughter, their feet pounding the ground as they chase each other. She can hear them calling to her, telling her to join them, and elation pours through her.  She hasn’t lost them after all.

 

She closes her eyes and doesn’t open them again.

 

 


	7. Tack [District 4 Male]

TACK

_District Four male tribute, killed at the Cornucopia on the first day_

 

 

For months Tack has been carrying his secret around: He does not want to go into the arena.

 

He knows if he lived in any other district, he wouldn’t have to go.  When he learned that One picks their candidates from a pool of actual volunteers, he was flooded not just with jealousy but with fury. Why can’t Four do that?  Do they really think it’s best to send someone into the arena who doesn’t want to be there?  

 

Then again, he’s not sure if they’ve ever really considered the possibility that their pick might not want to be there. In Two, he hears, there’s technically a list of volunteers, but it’s been years since anyone’s left their name off it.  What is it that makes Two different from Four?  Is there any difference at all?  Can Tack really be the first person in Four’s history who doesn’t want to go into the arena?

 

Tack has almost started to believe that, to believe that something is seriously wrong with him, until he talks to Finnick.  Tack’s scared to let on that he doesn’t want to go in.  Finnick’s scared to talk about his own experience.  But somehow, they find a code that allows them to say what can’t be said.

 

“I was surprised when they went with me,” Tack says one day, warily. “I thought they were going to go with Dolph.  He wanted it so much.”  Translation: Tack never wanted it.

 

Finnick gives Tack a long, hard look before responding.  Finally he says, “It was the same in my year. Pella Li -- you know him? He works in deepwater now -- I’ve never known anyone so anxious to get into that arena.  He nearly killed me himself when I got the pick.”  Tack thinks the translation of this might be that Finnick never wanted to go in either. He finds this hard to credit – Finnick? The most famous winner Four has ever had? – but there’s something in Finnick’s sea-green eyes, a sort of deep-down hardness and sorrow commingled, that convinces Tack.  And if Finnick never wanted to go, how many others must there be?

 

“Why did they pick me?” Tack blurts, then thinks he’s gone too far.

 

Finnick raises an eyebrow.  “You’re the package we’re looking for,” he says, in a more ordinary tone of voice. “You never miss with the throwing stars, and you’re good with a sword, so you’ve got both long-distance and close combat skill. You throw an axe like you’re from Seven and you use a trident and net like – well, like you’re from Four. You’re fast and you’re smart and you’re pretty good-looking.  Not as good-looking as me, of course --“ Finnick does an exaggerated preening pose for a moment, and Tack laughs -- “but who is?  You’ll do. Actually, you’re a stronger candidate than we’ve had in awhile.  Why wouldn’t they pick you?”

 

 _Because I’m scared to death and I don’t want to kill anyone,_ Tack thinks but doesn’t say.  You don’t say things like that, ever, even to a sympathetic mentor.

 

“And what you don’t have,” Finnick continues, “I’m here to teach you.”

 

“Like what?” Tack asks.

 

Finnick gives him a long, searching look, then shakes his head ever so slightly.  “You’ll find out,” he says.

 

But what they move on to is more work with the trident, which Tack knows he doesn’t need.  They do the same thing the next day, then move on to spears.  The spear isn’t Tack’s best weapon, but it still seems like wasted time to him – why does he need to become proficient with yet another weapon? He’s got plenty.  And none of the work they’re doing is making him feel any better about going into the arena  at all.  He’s not sleeping anymore, lying awake for hours with grainy, wide-open eyes, trying not to think about what the Games will be like and unable to think about anything else.  He’s so exhausted during the day that his weapon work begins to suffer after awhile, but Finnick doesn’t seem to mind.  He doesn’t even really seem to be paying attention.

 

And yet through it all there’s a strange look in Finnick’s eyes, assessing but cagey, and Tack has the sense that whatever Finnick wants to teach him that he doesn’t know, they haven’t gotten to it yet. He tries to think of this as a little bit of hope, but’s not much to hold on to.

 

Finally, when the reaping is just days away, Finnick decides to trust Tack.

 

That day Finnick is taking notes on Tack’s performance, as he’s done before, and passes the notes on to Tack at the end of the session.  Tack barely ever opens these anymore, but this one confuses him – it’s only one page, and he knows that Finnick took several pages’ worth of notes.  So when he gets home, he opens it.  In place of the usual performance critique, there’s a single line of writing in Finnick’s handwriting:

 

_Meet me at midnight at the north-side docks._

__A shiver runs through Tack, and he’s sure this is it.  Whatever Finnick has to teach him that he doesn’t already know, it’s happening tonight.

 

So that night he steals out to meet Finnick.  Without a word, Finnick steers him towards a small dinghy, just large enough for the both of them. Finnick rows them out across the bay, out to where the swells of the waves are getting larger and the shore is hard to distinguish from the sky.  Tack is getting more and more excited, knowing that Finnick is about to tell him things he couldn't say in view of the cameras in the training center, knowing how important this must be.  He wants to talk, to ask Finnick a thousand questions, but the silence and the bobbing of the boat on the waves and the even sound of the oars stroking through the water seem to hold him spellbound.

 

Finally, Finnick speaks for the first time, breaking the spell.

 

“They’re clockwork figures,” he says.

 

Tack stares at him.  Finnick doesn’t explain.

 

“What?” Tack says at last.

 

Finnick sighs.  “I told you I’d teach you what you don’t know yet –“

 

“I know.  I’ve been wondering,” Tack tells him.

 

Finnick’s smile is grim.  “Good.  I knew you had some sense.  So that’s it: they’re clockwork figures. The other tributes. Just clockwork.”

 

Tack thinks about this for a second.  “You mean…” He pauses.  “I’m sorry,” he says eventually.  “I still don’t know what you mean.”

 

So, in a low, intense voice, Finnick tells him.

 

The other tributes are not alive, he says.  They’re not human.  If you think of them as human you’ll never get through it.  They’re there to kill you, and you need to kill them first, but if you think of them as people you’ll never be able to do it. So you tell yourself over and over: they’re clockwork. They bleed and scream, but none of it hurts them, because they’re clockwork.  They don’t have families at home, people who love them, because they’re clockwork. They don’t care if they kill you and they don’t care if you kill them. None of it matters. Clockwork.  That’s all.

 

Tack wants to jump out of the boat, wants to swim away from all of this, this world where humans aren’t human and inanimate objects bleed and scream and are programmed to kill him.  But he sets his jaw in a hard line and forces the thought through his mind. Clockwork.  Clockwork.  Clockwork.

 

“Okay,” he says at last.  “I get it.”

 

“Tell me, then,” Finnick says, and Tack has to go through all of it again.  And again.  Until it’s bored its way deep into his brain.  Until Finnick can be sure he won’t forget.

 

Tack knows he won’t.

 

“So is there anything else?” Tack asks, when they’re done with that . “Anything else I need to know?”

 

Finnick thinks for a moment.  “Don’t trust the other Careers,” he says. “Even if they have your back at the start, you can’t trust them. Things will probably start to disintegrate about a week in, when most of the other tributes are dead.  After that they’ll turn on each other, on you. Try to get away before then.”

 

“Okay,” Tack says.  None of this is news to him. “What else?”

 

This time Finnick hesitates.  A long hesitation.  And now Tack can’t read his eyes at all.  It’s pain and sympathy and fear and – what?  What is happening here?

 

Finally Finnick speaks.  “An injury isn’t the worst thing in the world,” he says.

 

“I know,” Tack says, mystified, trying to figure out why Finnick looks like he’s about to fall apart completely with this simple piece of advice. “I just want to get out alive.  I don’t care if I get injured.”

 

“Something disfiguring.”  Finnick speaks in a rush. “Something that seems horrible – losing an eye, half of your nose, some sort of bad scar across your face. Sometimes if an injury’s bad enough even the Capitol can’t fix it, especially if it was infected.  If dirt gets in it while it’s still bloody – bugs – maybe snake venom…”  Tack can’t help shuddering.  He wants to cry out, to ask why in the world he would _want_ a horrible injury not to heal, but somehow he can’t speak. “It’s bad.  I know,” says Finnick. “But…” he trails off.  “It wouldn’t be the worst thing,” he finishes lamely.

 

Whatever is going on in Finnick’s eyes, Tack suddenly can’t stand it any longer.  “I bet you’re glad that never happened to you, though,” he says, trying for a teasing tone, thinking of all the jokes Finnick has made about his own beauty throughout training.  “How would you live without your good looks?”

 

“Much, much better,” Finnick says suddenly, much too loudly, and Tack is shocked by the bitterness in his voice.  Then Finnick turns his face away and they’re both silent for a long moment.

 

They row back to shore as silently as they rowed out.

 

In the next few days of training, back at the center, they make no reference to what they talked about in the boat, but Tack can’t think about anything else.  The day of the reaping, when they watch each of the tributes being called, Tack tests out his new strategy:  _You’re clockwork,_ he thinks of the pretty girl from District One.  _Clockwork,_ he tells the big dude from District Two.  The crippled boy from Ten: broken clockwork.  The girl from Twelve who volunteers for her sister: lying clockwork.  Clockwork doesn’t have families who love them.  Clockwork doesn’t love anyone.  He clings to this desperately as he sees the screaming little sister, the tears on her face.  _They’re not alive.  That little girl won’t cry if I kill her sister because she’s a fake, not human at all.  Her sister isn’t human.  None of them are human._   _Clockwork._ In truth, he’s repeated that word to himself so many times that it’s beginning to sound lumpy and foreign, starting to lose its meaning, but he keeps repeating it anyway, like a mantra, like a prayer that will save him: _clockwork clockwork clockwork clockwork clockwork clockwork clockwork clockwork_

__The last time he sees Finnick before he goes into the arena, Finnick squeezes his hand, then suddenly bends to kiss his cheek.  “Remember,” he says.  Tack nods.

 

And so as he rises into the arena on the plate he keeps telling himself they’re not alive, they don’t love, they don’t hurt, they don’t die because they’ve never lived.  He looks at each of their faces and repeats his mantra.  _Clockwork._

 

And then the Games begin, and within moments, one of the pieces of clockwork kills him.

 

As he lies on the ground, feeling the life trickle out of him, Tack looks up at the sky and tries to decide if he’s sorry.  He dies before he can make the decision.


	8. Palometa [District 4 Female]

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This chapter contains graphic violence.

PALOMETA

_District Four female tribute, killed by tracker jackers on day 5_

 

Palometa wakes up to screaming and pain and terror and fury.

 

There are things all over her and they’re buzzing and hurting her and she’s screaming and the things are in her mouth and she tries to spit them out but her tongue is filling her mouth and it’s all she can do to breathe and the pain is everywhere and she can’t scream anymore so she’s making horrible gargling noises in the back of her throat.  With the tiny bit of awareness she has left she hears the others running and shouting, something about the lake, the lake, and she drags herself to her feet and falls and drags herself up again and runs and falls and runs and falls, but the last time she falls she isn’t aware of it, seeing herself still running as the world turns shiny and overbright.  As she runs the forest around her melts into her home back in Four, smooth-floored and salt-smelling, and her mother is standing in front of her.

 

Palometa has a machete.

 

She’s running at her mother now and her mother stumbles back but Palometa keeps running, and now she’s holding her machete high and now she’s shrieking wordlessly and her mother is just beginning to speak, calling her by her baby name -- _Palo, Palo_ \-- when Palometa buries the machete in her mother’s chest.

 

There’s blood spurting from the wound and now Palometa and her mother are both shrieking and Palometa pulls the machete out of her mother’s chest and swings it at her neck.  Now there’s blood everywhere and her mother is on the ground, screaming and spasming and bleeding, and Palometa plunges the machete into the back of her mother’s head to be sure and then she loses it completely and goes mad, hitting her mother everywhere she can reach, and her mother spasms and screams even after Palometa cuts her head off completely and she’s screaming and screaming and after awhile Palometa knows she’s dead but she’s still screaming.  Palometa hefts the machete in her hand and sweeps it through the air in a wide arc and the scene dissolves.  And now it’s Carp, her little brother, standing before her.

 

So she kills her little brother too, the same way, and like their mother he screams and screams long after he’s dead and his blood is everywhere and Palometa’s clothes are soaked through.

 

And he dies and the scene dissolves and then it’s her baby sister, Sel, before her.  Sel drowned when she was a year old but that doesn’t stop Palometa from killing her.  Her baby screams are thin as paper and loud as murder.

 

Scene after scene dissolves and Palometa kills everyone she loves and then kills them again and the weapon in her hand is sometimes a machete and sometimes a mace and sometimes a sword and sometimes a knife but it doesn’t matter because they all bleed and they all die, over and over.  Palometa’s shrieking and running with her blood-sopping clothes clinging to her like a scuba wetsuit, and the worst thought she’s ever known is pounding through her Career's mind:

 

_All I know how to do is kill._

_All I know is killing._

 

So she kills and kills and kills and she has no idea she’s convulsing on the ground under a thin screening of trees, no idea that she is in pain beyond pain, no idea that her body exists at all.  One of her eyes twitches open for a second and she sees the lake before her and it’s a shimmering pool of blood, and she sees the blood falling from the sky and looks up and all her family, all her friends, all the people she cares about at all are caught in glittering black clouds and pouring blood into the lake. As she watches they explode into chunks of flesh and a rain of blood. And then it’s all gone and she’s back in her head, killing Aqua, her best friend.

 

And through it all the same thought is throbbing in her mind:

 

_All I know how to do is kill._

_All I know is killing._

She kills everyone she loves thousands of times in the few minutes it takes her to die. She doesn’t know when it happens, but the killing stops as her heart stops.

 

The Capitol scientists did a good job on the tracker jackers.

 

 


	9. Derrick [District 5 Male]

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This chapter contains graphic violence.

 

DERRICK

_District 5 male tribute, killed at the Cornucopia on the first day_

 

 

Derrick has always been more afraid of pain than anything else. Each year at the reaping, he’s terrified, but not in precisely the same way as the other children.  While they’re afraid of being sent to death, he’s afraid of being sent to pain before death.  When his name is called, he’s numb for a moment, for the first and last time in his life. He wishes he could stay that way forever, but of course he doesn’t. Pain is too plentiful in Panem for that.

 

Since he was a baby, it seems, he’s endured agony where others feel discomfort. A splinter in his foot left him shrieking for hours.  “He has a high sensitivity to pain – I think there’s something wrong with his nerves,” his mother said, gathering him protectively into her arms.  “It’s not a problem with his nerves,” his dad responded flatly, looking down at the purple, distorted face of his screaming, sobbing child. “The kid’s a wimp.” Over time Derrick learned to internalize the pain, keep the screams inside his head, find a hiding place where he could curl himself around the pain and rock and rock until it went away.  It didn’t much matter; his dad left when he was six anyway.  After that his mother started being less sympathetic.

 

Still, when his name is drawn at the reaping, his mother becomes hysterical, howling and blubbering the way that Derrick used to as a child.  “Promise me you’ll come home,” she wails, pushing his head to her chest, not waiting for an answer.  “You have to come home!  You can – just hide, stay away from everyone. You can win.  You’re such a fast runner. _Please_ , baby…”  Derrick holds her in his arms, feeling a million miles away from her.  He doesn’t promise her that he’ll come home, but she doesn’t seem to notice.  In the end the Peacekeepers have to tear her away from Derrick and drag her out.  Derrick’s glad when she’s gone.

 

When his older sister Field comes in, she isn’t crying.  That’s not her style.  Derrick meets her eyes and knows that there will be no pretense between them.  When he was hurt as a child, she used to bring him ice packs or bandages, things that never helped the pain at all, but that let him know he wasn’t alone.  In her steady gaze now, there is the same promise.

 

“How will you do it?” she asks him levelly.

 

He shrugs.  “I’m not sure.  Maybe I can do it before I get into the arena.”

 

She shakes her head.  “Try if you want, but I think it’s too risky. Too many doctors. And what would you do?”  
  


“There are some really high buildings,” he says.

 

She bites her lip. “If you can manage it,” she says.  “Make sure it’s high enough. And have a backup plan, OK?”

 

“Yeah,” he tells her.  “I’ll figure something out.”

 

“Okay,” she says.  And then the tears overflow.  “Oh, _fuck_ , Derrick.”

 

“I know,” he says, and holds her close.

 

“Promise me you won’t let them hurt you,” she whispers.  This time, Derrick promises.

 

When the Peacekeepers come in, letting her go is the hardest thing he’s ever had to do.  Then the door clicks shut and the room is silent, Derrick still staring at the space where his sister was a few seconds ago.  “Promise,” he murmurs.  

 

On the first night in the Capitol, he tries to jump off the roof of the Training Center, but it’s no use, it just throws him back on.  He scrapes his back when he lands and crumples to the ground, curling reflexively into fetal position, feeling the tears leaking down his cheeks, the silent scream ricocheting around in his head. The mild electric shock is ringing through his body, convulsing his fingers, making his head snap back and forth on his neck.  _Fuck_ , he thinks foggily.  _I’m going to have to do it in the arena._

When he arrives for training the first day he steers towards the weapons at first, gauging which ones he could kill himself with the quickest, but then his eye lands on the edible plants station and he makes a beeline towards it.  It’s perfect.  He can eat something poisonous and be out of the arena in minutes.  The instructor looks at him oddly at first as he asks how long each berry, root, or leaf would take to kill a person, and what the manner of death would be – would there be pain? -- but then he gives Derrick a hard looking-over, seeing the boy’s scrawny build, his awkward, listing stance, the softness in his face and eyes, and he nods, understanding. During the next few days of training, Derrick spends some time at the other stations, mostly at the knot-tying station, learning to tie a noose.  But rope’s likely to be scarce in the arena for a boy who won’t be picking anything up from the Cornucopia, and anyway, the plants will be faster.  Even after he knows all the plants at the station forward and back, Derrick spends hours there, fingering the berries and leaves, committing their texture to memory.  The instructor watches him closely, knowing the pain that would land on his own head if Derrick managed to commit suicide at his station before the Games start.

 

Derrick falls asleep each night still cradling the images of the poisonous plants, his resolution ringing through his mind: _I will choose how I die.  I will choose how I die.  I will choose how I die._

 

When Derrick’s plate rises into the Games, he looks around avidly and is relieved beyond measure to see the woods, on the far side of the circle from where he is.  The grass doesn’t look promising, but those woods are perfect.  When the gong rings, he’s off his plate before the sound has died, sprinting straight for the woods, barely skirting the Cornucopia.  If he’d been thinking straight he’d have taken off for the grass and doubled back around, making sure he stayed well out of the way of the bloodbath. But he’s not thinking straight and all he can think of is the woods, its trees providing refuge for shade-loving bushes heavy with berries that will get him out of here quick. So he runs the wrong way, past the Cornucopia, and he realizes too late what he’s done and tries to zigzag away, out of range, but he’s not nearly quick enough to get out of range of Cato’s spear.

 

So Cato gets to choose how Derrick will die. The spear tears through his side to lodge in his stomach and for all his experience of pain, Derrick could never have imagined anything like this. And he’s never heard noises like the ones coming out of his mouth now, garbled sobbing noises that sometimes sound like screams and sometimes like moans and sometimes like lunatic cries that there’s no word for in the English language. He tries to beg someone at the Cornucopia to finish him off, but he can’t form words anymore. He tries to grab the spear and remove it, so he can plunge it into his eye and through his brain, but he can’t do it. Blood is pooling around his abdomen and he tries to drag himself around so he can drown himself in the blood, but he can’t manage that either.  A few times, all his coherent thoughts shattered, he tries to make his body lurch toward the woods, toward his berries, but he barely makes it a couple inches.  So he lies on the ground, convulsing, shrieking, crazed with pain. In ten minutes he couldn’t have told you what his name was.  In twenty minutes he couldn’t have told you where he was. In thirty minutes he barely exists at all.  But he never passes out.  There is no mercy for him in these Games.  There’s only pain.

 

Watching at home on TV his mother runs shrieking from the room after two minutes of this, unable to bear it.  Field does not leave the room.  She watches the whole thing, from the moment Derrick is wounded through the entire bloodbath.  There’s so much action at the Cornucopia that the cameras only cut to Derrick rarely, although whoever is editing the video does seem fascinated with the particularly horrible death that Derrick is experiencing and cuts back a bit more often than might be expected.  Field forces herself to watch this.  Her hands are knotted in her lap, her teeth grinding to powder, but she refuses to look away.  For the last time, she will not let Derrick suffer his pain alone.

 

She doesn’t know when he dies.  The camera isn’t on him.  After forty minutes or so, when Derrick’s shrieks became hoarse and his body stretched out, twitching, the editor lost interest and stopped showing him.  Field watches other children die without seeing much of it.  Eventually the fighting at the Cornucopia ends.  The cannons begin.  As each boom sounds, the camera cuts away to one dead tribute.  Derrick is the ninth one that they show. Field presumes that means he was the ninth one to die.  Ninth out of eleven.

 

 _But you promised_ , Field thinks, staring at the bloody body of her brother, his limbs akimbo, his face cut and bruised from convulsing against the ground. His eyes are wide open, bulging and sightless.  _You promised._

 

Field curls into fetal position, tears leaking down her face, a silent scream ricocheting through her mind. 


	10. Joule ("Foxface") [District 5 Female]

JOULE

_District 5 female tribute, dies from nightlock poisoning on day 16_

 

The thing is, Joule doesn’t need the food she steals.  If she’d gone into the arena without learning everything the training center could teach her about edible plants, she’d deserve to die.  No, Joule is doing fine on food. Her reason for stealing from the others is even simpler than that: Joule really likes stealing.

 

Not that she’s a kleptomaniac or anything.  She’s never felt compelled to steal.  And she’s never, not even once, been caught. She’s too smart for that.  Which, of course, is the point. She steals from people who annoy her, people who seem to have gotten the idea somehow that they’re better than her.  Popular girls who make fun of her, teachers who don’t like her, Peacekeepers who kick her out of places she’s got every right to be.  The popular girls lose hair bows, notepaper, occasionally buttons off sweaters left hanging carelessly over a chair back, especially if they can’t afford to replace them.  Her teacher lost two days’ worth of food ration tickets.  The Peacekeepers are the only people she’s stolen money from – well, they’re the only ones who have money for her to steal.  She knew she’d be hanged if they’d found out she did that, but she also knew they’d never find out.  And they didn’t.

 

So Joule steals in the arena. It’s a major kick because, of course, in District Five, her stealing could only annoy people.  Here in the arena, each bite of food is life – particularly for the Careers, who have no idea how to get any more. After she managed to get through the minefield, after watching the Careers closely each time they navigated it for two days, she was suffused with a kind of joy that a Capitol citizen might have recognized as close kin to an ecstasy high. She steals apples, oranges, crackers, tiny bits of cheese – anything they won’t miss.  She wouldn’t dare steal anything but food – they’d be sure to notice that – but she doesn’t really need much, anyway.  At the Cornucopia, she’d hung around at the edge of the woods, well hidden from the Cornucopia crowd who were all busy either killing or dying, until she could scavenge a knife out of the back of a girl who’d almost made the trees before Clove got her from thirty feet, plus a set of fishing tackle the girl wasted her life trying to get.  She thought of trying for the girl’s jacket, but that would have left her exposed for too long. So she pulls moss from trees, fills her own jacket with it, steals a coal from a dying fire left by that moron girl who got herself killed the first night and stashes it in a corner of her metal tackle box, and then, warm and armed and equipped with fire, she begins stalking the others.

 

After the first day, the Games begin for Joule for real. With some basic tracking skills she’s figured out – step where they've stepped, move when they move -- soon Joule knows everything about her opponents, both important stuff and irrelevant stuff.  She knows where the Careers will go hunting each day, and she knows where the 12 boy is hidden in the weeds and mud.  She knows the golden patch of the grass where the 11 giant guy has holed up, eating some kind of grain and glaring out into the grass surrounding him, and she’s pretty sure he hears her move once, but although his eyes flick in her direction, he stays where he is.  So now she knows he doesn’t much like killing, which is great. She knows the 10 boy is hidden deep in the grass, and that he’s almost as good as she is at evasion.  She knows that the 12 girl calls her “Foxface,” which she kind of likes, and she knows that girl nearly fell apart completely when the little 11 girl died. Joule doesn’t see the sense of that.  Why would you let yourself get attached to someone who’s going to be dead within days?  She knows that as time passes and Joule emerges as a real competitor, the tributes from 2 start calling her “the redheaded bitch,” but though they mention a few times how easy she’d be to kill, they don’t seem to bother much with trying to track her down.  She seems too harmless.  Perfect.

 

So the days wear on, full of fishing and gathering and stalking and stealing. She has little trouble with the Gamemakers, avoiding most of the traps they’ve set, although she did get caught up in the edge of that firestorm. The burns suck, but she’ll live.  When she hears the Gamemakers’ announcement of the feast, she’s actually a little offended for a moment – she doesn’t desperately need anything, she’s made sure of that – but she decides to go in for it anyway, knowing she’s safe if she hides in the Cornucopia, knowing no one else will think of it.  They don’t, and she gets away with burn ointment, night-vision goggles, a self-heating blanket, and a blowgun. She also gets away with the knowledge that she’s smarter than the rest of them, which she enjoys more than the rest of the supplies combined.

 

After the feast they’re down to five, and she realizes with relief that she has a damn good shot of getting out of these Games now.  After the 11 giant gets taken out, she’s sure she will.  Two’s not going to bother with her until after he’s had it out with the 12s, and she can’t believe there’ll be more than one of the three of them alive after that.  One tribute, one blowgun dart from the underbrush. End scene.  End Games.

 

So she’s tracking the 12s, waiting for Two to show up, biding her time. In her mind, she's already skipped forward to the Capitol celebrations in her honor, she's that sure she's won. What could go wrong now, after all? She knows everything about the other tributes, their strengths and weaknesses and plans and blind spots.  She knows everything they know.

 

The 12 boy leaves the cheese and the berries on the ground and goes off somewhere.  Too easy.  She creeps forward toward the food, a smile on her face.  She’s as good as home now.


	11. Claudia [District 6 Female]

CLAUDIA

_District 6 female tribute, killed at the Cornucopia on the first day_

 

Claudia is going to make it home from the Games.  Sure as she’s breathing now, she will be breathing then.  In a way, actually, getting reaped is exciting.  When she wins, her district will be showered with gifts; she’ll move to Victor’s Village, wear beautiful clothes, and eat Capitol-made delicacies all day.  “Don’t worry about me,” she tells her mother brightly as they say goodbye.  “There’s nothing to worry about.  I’m coming home.  You’ll see.”

 

Her mother doesn’t say anything, just clasps Claudia all the harder.  Well, it doesn’t matter.  She’ll believe it when she sees it.

 

Her boyfriend comes in to see her for a few moments before she leaves as well, and he’s clearly there to say a final goodbye too, but she won’t let him.  “Don’t.  We’ll be back together in a month, tops.  And you know what we’ll do then?”  Claudia leans in and whispers in his ear, a wicked smile dancing across her face.  He turns red, as she knew he would, and then turns his face away, and she thinks he’s crying.  She can’t bear that.  “Listen,” she says, placing a palm on each of his cheeks, turning his face toward her gently.  “I know you don’t think I can do this, but I can. No one is going to pay any attention to me, I’m going to make sure of that.  The Games aren’t just about killing.  They’re about hiding and surviving and outsmarting the others.  I can do that.”  She places her palm on his and raises them both to eye level.  “I will come home.  I swear.”

 

He looks at her for a long moment, then nods once.  “Okay,” he says, his voice husky. “I’ll... see you in a month.”

 

Claudia hugs him tightly, electing to listen to his words and ignore the doubt in his eyes, the tears on his cheeks. She imagines the joy that she’ll see in his face when she returns.

 

In the training center, Claudia works her ass off.  As soon as she gets there she strides over to the weapons instructor and says confidently, “I don’t have any experience with weapons, but I don’t need to be amazing with any of them.  I just need to know how to handle one or two of them.  Which ones do you think I should learn?”

 

The instructor looks her over for a long moment, seeing her small stature, her scrawny body, and the sweet, innocent look in a pair of green eyes that show absolutely no danger or ruthlessness.  “Let’s try a bow and arrow,” she says eventually.  “That way you can stay out of close combat.”

 

Unfortunately Claudia’s pretty lousy with the bow and arrow and she’s even worse at throwing knives.  She isn’t bad with a sword, though, once the trainer shows her where to cut, and blowguns are easy. After a few hours she says goodbye to the trainer there, promising that she’ll be back to work some more tomorrow.  Then she heads over to the more important stations, the stations that will keep her safe and out of most of the fights: camouflage, edible plants, snares, first aid, and fire-starting.  She gets pretty good at starting a fire with a match, although she’s patchy when she tries to start it with flint.  She’s decent at camouflage, though not as good as Peeta (she’s making a point of learning the names of the friendlier tributes; it could lead to an alliance later), and she studies edible plants until she’s got most of them memorized. She’s quite good at first aid, to her delight.  She’s not great with snares, but Katniss is good with them, so she goes out of her way to be nice to Katniss too.  Katniss, Peeta, and Claudia would make a great alliance. 

 

At the end of training, after showing the judges everything she’s learned, she comes out with a four.  It doesn’t bother her, though, especially since seeming like a weakling is part of her plan.  She may not be the best at anything, but she’s competent in the important stuff, and that’s all she needs. No one will pay any attention to her.  She’ll survive on her own while the rest of them are fighting and killing, and when they’re done, she’ll go home.

 

When the plates begin to rise into the arena, Claudia does feel a tingle of fear, an uncomfortably rushing heartbeat, a tremble in her hands.  But there’s excitement, too, excitement that this is finally starting.  Then the gong rings, and as she bounds off her plate, her left foot catches on the edge of it and she goes down.  _Shit._  But it’s okay, she’s up again, she’s running, although she seems to have done something to her ankle and she’s limping a bit.  But that’s okay, there’s so much adrenaline rushing through her that she’s still making good time.  She hears a scream from the Cornucopia, then another, evidence that the bloodbath has started, and although the screams shake her, it’s really a good thing for her: no one will be bothering with her now.  Just then she takes a wrong step and her ankle gives out completely.  She collapses to the ground in a heap, then struggles to her feet to run again. Then Clove’s knife catches her in the back and she’s down for good.

 

She’s not sure what’s happened, doesn’t know what’s going on.  There’s no pain in her back at first, just a spreading numbness, but when she tries to push herself up again, she’s can only rise to her knees before she falls face-first onto the ground.  She begins to try to scrabble forward, trying to pull with her hands and push with her legs, but it doesn’t work, she’s just flailing around.  A weird noise is coming from somewhere, a high-pitched, ululating keening, and she thinks it must be from some animal at the edge of the forest, because it doesn’t sound human. Now there’s a stab of agony in her back, and she begins coughing blood. Darkness is creeping over the corners of her vision. It’s becoming harder and harder to move. 

 

 _What?_ she thinks, and dies.


	12. Kiphe [District 6 Male]

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This chapter contains strong language.

KIPHE

_District 6 male tribute, killed at the Cornucopia on the first day_

 

In the moments after he is reaped, staring dazed at the throngs of people crowded around the stage, one clear thought lances through the shock in Kiphe’s mind:

 

_Those fuckers are going down._

 

When his name was called and he ascended the stage, a ripple ran through the crowd with a little more interest than usual.  Now, descending from the stage and being herded toward the Justice Building, Kiphe hears snatches of conversations:

 

“He could do it.  He knows how to fight.”

 

“Yeah, and he’s like three feet tall, too.  Be serious, man.”

 

“I am being serious.  Kid’s fucking badass.”

 

“Just because he kicked your ass last week don’t make him badass...”  And then Kiphe is in the Justice Building and away from the chatter, which is fine by him since it sounded like it was heading toward a fight anyway, and he’s not sure he could be near a fight right now without jumping in. Kiphe is used to rage, but this is something else again.

 

The Peacekeepers escort him into some fancy room that Kiphe hates on sight, but he figures he won’t be here very long.  They say he can say goodbye to friends and family here, but who is that going to be?  His dad’s the only one around, and Kiphe doubts he’ll even notice Kiphe’s gone until he’s looking for someone to kick around.  Time for him to get a dog.

 

So Kiphe’s surprised when his dad comes in, after all.  Kiphe sees he stopped by the market to grab a bottle of liquor.  Big surprise.  It’s a fresh bottle, though, just a few swigs missing. His dad approaches, still walking straight, and proffers the bottle to Kiphe. “Want some?” he asks.

 

Kiphe grabs the bottle and takes a slug, then another.  He doesn’t bother to say thanks. He’s not feeling real grateful at the moment.

 

“You think you can win?” his dad asks him, his tone serious enough.

 

Kiphe’s eyes narrow – what a fucked-up question.  “Nope,” he says.

 

“Yeah.  Me neither,” his dad says, and they sit in silence for a moment.  His dad upends the bottle for a long drink, then passes it back to Kiphe.  Kiphe takes another swig.  His head’s already starting to spin; his dad doesn’t make a habit of sharing his liquor with Kiphe, and between that and his size, Kiphe’s pretty much a lightweight.  He’s not sure what he thinks of the dizzy sensation.  He’d rather skip straight to passing out. He takes another mouthful and hands it back.

 

“Hey,” his dad says suddenly.  Kiphe glances up at him.  His face is twisted in something between a scowl and what Kiphe would figure for a sad look if his dad were capable of feeling sad, which he isn’t, far as Kiphe knows.  “Hey,” he says again.

 

“Yeah?” Kiphe says warily.

 

His dad looks at him straight.  “Fuck them up, okay?”

 

And for the first time in his life, Kiphe feels like he and his dad understand each other.   “Yeah,” he says .

 

“Good,” his dad says.  Then he lays his hand on Kiphe’s shoulder.  “Try to come home if you can.”

 

“I can’t,” Kiphe says, annoyed.  So much for understanding each other.

 

“But if you can.”

 

“Yeah, sure.”  Kiphe reaches to take the bottle back, but his dad holds it away.  “Don’t want you drinking yourself to death before you get there,” he tells his son.

 

“Why not?” Kiphe says.

 

His dad sighs, but he doesn’t give the bottle back.  Just then the Peacekeepers arrive at the door, ready to escort him out.   Kiphe gets the surprise of his life when the old man bends down and gives him a kiss on the forehead.  “You’re not the worst of them.  Try to get back,” he says.  He brushes his hand over Kiphe’s shoulders, then lets the Peacekeepers lead him out, leaning a little.

 

“What the fuck?” Kiphe says to the closed door.

 

Most of the Capitol is a blur to Kiphe; he’s not into fancy shit and he’s not into pretense, and that’s basically all the Capitol is made of.  He pays attention to the other tributes, though -- mostly the Careers.  The rest of them, he figures, are in the same bag he is, more or less, but the Careers are different.  They’re cocky as hell and they know the odds are that one of them will win.  They’re the ones that Kiphe thought of, standing there on that platform at the reaping.  They’re the ones who are going down.

 

At least one of them, anyway.  Kiphe isn’t stupid and he knows he’s not going to somehow slaughter all six of them at the starting gong. But one of them.  That would be good.  One Career to learn what it’s like to fight and lose and die like someone from the poor districts.

 

So in training, Kiphe learns everything he can while trying to appear to learn nothing at all.  If the Careers see that he can fight, if they see him as an actual threat, this will never work.  So Kiphe learns the skills, but doesn’t use them.  He trains in hand-to-hand combat and learns the finer points of the skills he’s picked up in street brawls.  His trainers seem confused: he’s got the form perfect and no force at all.  “Put your weight behind it,” they keep telling him.  Kiphe doesn’t.  It’s the same deal when he trains with the weapons: he learns how and where to stab or smash or slice, but each time he practices he throws in a wobble at the end, or deliberately lets go of the weapon, or does the right move with the wrong stance or the right stance with the wrong move.  He really enjoys himself in the judging session, fucking everything up as much as possible with just a few decent moves so his score won’t be improbably low.  He gets a three.  Perfect.

 

And then he’s in the arena and his plate is rising and he’s thrumming with adrenaline, the blood beating in his temples deafening him.  He’s already in stance to run into the Cornucopia, throw himself into the middle of the bloodbath, take out whichever Careers he can before he gets taken out himself.  And yet his father’s last words keep ringing, unwelcome, through his brain:

 

_Try to come home if you can._

 

Kiphe doesn’t know why in the world he should listen to his dad now, but the words have him frozen on his plate, his muscles tensed – but like they want to throw him back into the woods, not forward into the bloodbath.

 

 _You’re not the worst of them.  Try to come back_.

 

And why would he want to?  What does he have to go back to – beating, fights, hunger, rage?  That’s what his dad wants him to come back for?  Shit.  Kiphe tells himself this, he runs through it in his mind until he’s got it all straight -- but his weight is still balanced in the wrong direction.

 

_Try to come back.  If you can.  Come back.  You’re not the worst.  Come back._

 

Kiphe looks around the circle and sees fresh, immediate fear in about half the faces, especially those whose lips have been moving as they count down.  He figures that means time’s almost up.  He needs to decide what to do right now.  _Right now._

_Try –_

 

The gong rings and everyone springs off their plates.

 

Fuck it.

 

Kiphe tears into the center of things like a bat out of hell, targets the Four girl, jumps her, wrestles her to the ground, grabs her knife from her.   He tries to take her out but she somehow gets out from under him and scrambles away, so instead of chasing her he takes a fast glance around, sees the boy from Four with his back turned.  Kiphe tackles him from behind, slits his throat, lets him drop.  A second later the Four girl is back, this time with a sword.  She slices Kiphe’s head off entirely in one swift move.  It’s over.

 

At home, Kiphe’s dad springs off his seat and grabs the TV, smashes it on the floor, breaks a few knuckles punching the doorjamb, kicks a hole in the wall and tries to throw the bed through the window.  When he can’t manage it he stands in the middle of the room for a second, spent, breathing hard. He looks out the window for somebody – anybody – to hurt.

 

Then he moves across the room to the cabinet where he keeps the booze and grabs a fresh bottle.   He sits down on the bed and chugs.  He doesn’t know what he’s going to do with himself when the bottle is gone.  He doesn’t know what to do with any of this.

 

 _Serves you right,_ Kiphe says in his head.

 

The old man nods and takes another swig, accepting this. 


	13. Acacia [District 7 Female]

 

ACACIA

_District 7 female tribute, killed at the Cornucopia on day one_

 

Within seconds of their meeting, it’s clear that Johanna has no use for Acacia.  At all.

 

Acacia has to work constantly on Johanna to get any mentoring at all.  “But what do I do?” she keeps asking, all through the train ride that brings them to the Capitol.  “How do I get sponsors?  Which stations should I be working on in training? Should I be learning to kill or just survive or what?”

 

“Doesn’t matter,” Johanna tells her with a yawn.  “Do whatever you want.  It’s not going to change anything.”

 

“Yes, it will!” Acacia cries, her face flushing.  “I’m never going to win with no help from you!  I have no idea what I’m doing!”

 

“Neither do the rest of them.  Except the Careers,” Johanna says, craning her neck as she hears an attendant coming down the hallway.  “So stay away from the Careers.  Hey!” she yells, as the attendant passes by their door.  “I want red wine and some of those truffles.  And the chocolate-dipped oranges.  Actually, just bring some fruit and a pot of chocolate to dip it in.  Enough for two,” she adds, and bares her teeth at Acacia in what might be meant to be a smile.  “You know what you can do, you can eat a lot.  Need some strength going into the arena, right?  You want any liquor?  They’ll give you liquor if you want it.”

 

“I don’t want _liquor!”_  Acacia can’t believe this.  “And I don’t want food!  I want to know how I can win the Games!”

 

Johanna closes her eyes and leans back in her seat.  “Then you better ask someone else, because I don’t know.”

 

The food comes then and Johanna perks up immediately, piling slices of fruit on a stick, dipping them in chocolate, and shoving them all into her mouth at once.  “Mmm.  Try the oranges.  They’re really good,” she says indistinctly, her mouth full.

 

Acacia glowers at the bowl of fruit, debates overturning the pot of chocolate on Johanna’s head, but knows that she can’t.  She needs Johanna to mentor her.  There must be some way to make her do it.  Johanna _has_ to mentor her.  She’ll never get out of the Games otherwise.

 

Of course she knows perfectly well what Johanna is saying: there is no chance that Acacia will win the Games.  But that’s not fair.  It’s not fair!  Acacia has a family at home that she has to take care of.  She has a son.

 

Pine.  Her son.

 

Not that Johanna knows that.  Nobody knows that. They think he’s her brother.  Her mom wadded blankets under her shirt for awhile and pretended Acacia was bedridden with pneumonia.   But Pine is her son. _Her son._   She fed him and changed his diapers and held him close every time he cried, even though her mom told her he’d grow up spoiled.  When he was teething she was the only one who could calm him.  When he had an ear infection she stayed home from school with him and stole money from one of the merchant girls to buy him medicine.  She sleeps with him every night, her body curved around his, pressing her lips to his head and the red curls just beginning to grow in, so much like her own.  She hasn’t had a bad dream once since Pine was born and she feels him in her arms as she drifts off to sleep, warm and safe and happy.  He's just started to walk, toddling around uncertainly, but when he makes it to where he’s trying to go he wears a huge, heartbreaking smile.  And he just said his first word a month ago.  It was “mama”.

 

Acacia has to get back to him.  Her mom’s impatient with him and doesn’t seem to love him at all, still angry with Acacia for ever having him in the first place – “Fifteen!  You can’t even legally get married!” she said over and over, not that Maple would ever have married her anyway.  He moved on to Alayne three weeks after he found out Acacia was pregnant.  Two years ago Acacia couldn’t have imagined the pain of a life without him, but now she couldn’t care less.  She has Pine.  He’s all she needs.

 

And she’s all he has.

 

So she refuses to let Johanna give up on her.  Acacia’s not all that strong, but she knows that no one in these Games – _no one_ – needs to get home as badly as she does, that no one has as much hanging on their victory as her.  Acacia doesn’t know much about God – religion is a fringe thing in Seven, only practiced by a few weirdos who are willing to risk a whipping to gather in someone’s home and talk about an old man in the clouds --  but she knows that there has to be something in the universe that will protect her, if she works hard enough.  There must be something that protects children from losing mothers who love them this much, love enough to fill a world.  Love has to be more powerful than death.

 

So eventually, after several days of getting nowhere with Johanna, Acacia tells Johanna about Pine.

 

When she does, all the blood drains from Johanna’s face.

 

“You’re putting me on,” she says after a minute.  “So that I’ll train you.  I told you and told you, there’s nothing –“

 

“I’m _not_ putting you on.”  Acacia tries to keep her voice very steady, pushes back the tears she can feel welling in her eyes, because she knows Johanna will never respect her if she cries.  “I have a son.  He’s only a year old.  I don’t know if you know my family, people think he’s my brother –“ Johanna shakes her head – “but he’s _my son_.  I have to survive and go back to him.  I have to go back!”  And then, despite her best efforts, the tears overflow.  She turns her face away from Johanna sharply to hide her tears.  But of course Johanna sees them.  Johanna doesn’t miss much of anything.

 

“Fuck,” she says, turning away from Acacia herself.  “Just… _fuck._ What are you doing having a kid at your age?  Someone should’ve locked you up – someone should –“

 

“Someone should _tell me how to get out of these Games alive,”_ Acacia says, and there is so much strength in her voice now that Johanna turns back to her and looks at her hard.  Acacia looks straight back at Johanna, willing her to see the determination behind her tears, willing her to see that Acacia _can win_ the Games if she knows what she’s doing.

 

So they begin training.

 

Johanna wants Acacia to do exactly what Johanna herself did in her Games.  “Make them think you’re a weakling.  Make them ignore you.  Learn to hide, learn camouflage, and stay the hell away from everyone.”

 

“But they already know you did that!” Acacia says.  “They’ll see through it in a second.  And they’ll pay attention to me no matter what.  I’m five-ten.”

 

“And you’re about ninety pounds.  So play the tall thing up.  Pretend you can’t move without falling over your own feet.  Bang your head on stuff.  Make them think you’ll make tons of noise in the woods.”

 

“No one from Seven would ever make tons of noise in the woods.”

 

“They won’t notice that if you act like you’re stupid.  Dammit, I wish we could pretend you’re retarded.”

 

“Why can’t we?”

 

“Maybe you _are_ retarded.  You’ve been acting normal around them since you got here, brainless.”  Suddenly Johanna stands up.  “This is hopeless.  You’re hopeless.  I’m going to dinner.”

 

Their training sessions are all like that: Johanna will work with her for a little while, then suddenly take off.  It frustrates Acacia beyond measure; she wants to be training every second.  After it’s happened three days in a row, she forces herself to talk to Finnick, who’s the only person in the Capitol who seems to be friends with Johanna.  She’s terrified of Finnick, of his fame, of his sexiness, of his condescension, but she makes herself do it because she has to get home.

 

When she first begins to talk to him Finnick is every bit his usual insouciant self, but his face becomes serious when she asks him what she can do to make Johanna pay attention to her.  “What do you think?” she asks at last.

 

“I think you should count your blessings.  Johanna never pays any attention to her tributes.  How did you get her to do it?”

 

“Never mind that.”  Acacia couldn’t bear to tell Finnick about Pine.  “I just need to know how I can make her help me more than this.  I just… I _have_ to win.”

 

There’s a modicum of pity in Finnick’s eyes as he looks at her.  “I was serious when I told you to count your blessings,” he says.  “You can’t get her to do any more than she’s doing now.”

 

“But she doesn’t care!  She doesn’t care if I live or die!”

 

“No.  And she’s not going to let herself,” Finnick says.

 

“Let herself?” Acacia says, puzzled. 

 

“Yes.”  And all of a sudden Finnick’s back to being the guy she’s seen on TV all these years.  “Sorry I can’t stay, Acacia, but I’ve got places to go, people to see.  _Women_ to see,” he adds, and winks at her.  “Unless you want to come?”

 

With despair Acacia realizes that Finnick is the creepiest person in the world, and of absolutely no use to her.  “No,” she says, and turns to go.  She doesn’t see his gaze follow her as she goes, or the sorrow in his eyes.

 

“Is there any chance she can win?” he asks Johanna quietly, later that night.

 

“No.” Johanna makes an elaborate show of stretching.  “Better turn in.”

 

And again, as he watches her leave the room, Finnick’s eyes are touched with sorrow.

 

Johanna’s training becomes even more sporadic after that night, and in her manner she's shut down completely, showing Acacia nothing but sarcasm and impatience.  She’s annoyed that Acacia keeps on working on sprinting in training, which she plans to use to give her an advantage at the Cornucopia, and that she insists on training with weapons.  “All you’re ever going to use is an axe and a knife, or are you too stupid to use those too?” she snaps.  “Forget the weapons, forget the sprinting, and just get the fuck away from the Cornucopia.  How many times do I have to tell you?”

 

“I don’t know.  Maybe you should talk to me for more than a half an hour a day, and then I’d be able to figure it out,” Acacia retorts angrily.

 

“Fine.  Forget it.”  And Johanna stomps away.

 

By the last day of training, Acacia’s lost faith in Johanna’s so-called mentoring completely.  She hasn’t offered a single useful thing.  All she’s done is to tell Acacia to do what she did.  What kind of help is that?  Acacia could have learned that from watching Johanna’s Games.  And she doesn’t think any of it really applies to her.  Johanna knew how to start fires without matches, a skill Acacia doesn’t seem to be able to master no matter how she tries. Johanna was short and compact enough that it was easier for her to curl up in small hiding places, like in bushes or behind rocks; Acacia’s height is going to make that a lot harder. And Johanna’s got blond hair, which is a lot easier to hide than Acacia’s orangey-red mess of curls. She’s tried time and time again to get her stylist to let her dye it, but she won’t.  No, Acacia can’t hide away as well as Johanna did – and anyway, Johanna still had to kill the last few people.  And she’d had an axe.  What if there are no axes in the arena?  Acacia needs to be training with weapons, and she needs to be able to get something at the Cornucopia.  She’ll need matches, and she’ll need some kind of weapon.  She shouldn’t have to go all the way into the Cornucopia for those, there should be some scattered a ways out – blowguns or sharpened boomerangs or small knives --  but she will need them.  And she’s pretty fast.  Of the people who’ve trained in sprinting, she’s faster than everyone besides the Careers and the Nine boy.  She’ll grab whatever she can within, say, fifteen yards, and then she’ll clear out.   It’ll be fine.

 

Despite these plans, though, Acacia is completely unprepared for the terror that overcomes her when her plate rises into the arena.  She wants nothing more than to take Johanna’s advice, run into the woods and get lost.  But she can’t.  Or can she?  Johanna must know something about surviving, or she wouldn’t be a victor – but Acacia’s not Johanna, she needs to take care of herself, not pretend to be Johanna.  She won’t survive without something from the Cornucopia, she knows it.  But oh God how much she wants to run into the woods and disappear…     

 

To steady herself, she thinks of Pine. She thinks of his little face, his pink cheeks (Acacia gives him more of her food than she should, enough that he’s growing up healthy) and his gap-toothed smile.  She thinks of his tiny feet, so unsteady as he toddles around, and of his tiny hands, which can now grab a few of her fingers, something that always makes him smile.  He hasn’t caught the hang of playing pat-a-cake yet, but he still squeals with laughter whenever she tries to play it with him.  She knows he’ll catch on soon, maybe next month.  But not if she’s not there.  Her mom would never bother to play with him.  Who will hold him at night if she’s not there?  Who will bathe him, and blow kisses on his belly, and sing him a lullaby before he sleeps?  Who will calm him when he’s teething?  The thought of Pine in pain, with no one to help him or care for him, always solidifies her resolve.  _She has to get home_.

 

With the little time she has left, she makes herself scan the ground near her for anything that will help – something she should have done before, when she was too terrified to think.  But it’s okay, there’s a blanket just a few yards away, and what looks like a penknife maybe ten yards in, and at twenty yards there’s a backpack that she suspects contains matches, they usually do.  She had planned to go only fifteen yards in, but she’ll need that backpack.  And she’s fast.  She can get it and get out.  She’ll survive.  She’ll go home to Pine.

 

The gong rings and she leaps off her plate, running furiously, snagging the blanket and the penknife.  She sees both the Nine boy and the Twelve girl going for the backpack, and she almost turns tail and runs – what if she doesn’t get it? – but the adrenaline rushing through her gives her a spurt of speed, she’s sure she’s never run this fast, and she needs that backpack.  She’ll never survive without matches, never.  She’s running like crazy and her breath is coming out in sharp _whoo-whoo-whoo_ noises and her feet are pounding and pounding and then there’s something coming in her peripheral vision, a spear, and she flattens herself to the ground and it passes over her head and she laughs because she may be from Seven but she just dodged a Career attack, and she’s army-crawling toward the backpack and she knows she’ll get it now –

 

The girl from Two runs by, on her way to get the other two kids converging on the backpack, and as she passes Acacia she bends down, still running, stabs Acacia in the back, kicks her over on her front and slits her throat, and keeps going.

 

Acacia’s in pain like she’s never imagined, and she’s choking on her own blood and her vision is fading away and she knows she’s dying.  The image of Pine’s face flashes before her mind for the last time, and she’s thinking _Mommy, Mommy please, Mommy please take care of him, Mommy –_ She dies without an answer.

 

In her suite in the Victors’ building in the Capitol, Johanna watches the scene with narrowed eyes.  She sees Acacia disobey all her orders and run in for the blanket, the knife, the backpack.  She sees Clove stab her, slit her throat.  She sees her die.

 

“Dammit,” she says softly, as the camera zooms in on Acacia’s glassy eyes, the pools of blood spreading around her.  “ _Damn_.”

She snaps the TV off and heads down to the bar for a drink, slamming the door behind her. 


	14. Jack [District 7 Male]

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This chapter contains graphic violence.

JACK

_District 7 male tribute, killed at the Cornucopia on the first day_

 

Jack needs someone to hold onto during training, and the person he finds is Cire.

 

On the train ride to the Capitol and the first few days there, he spends about three-fourths of his time either crying or sedated.  He thinks of his family at home, how he’ll probably never see them again, and he sobs.  He thinks of the smell of pine balsam and how he’ll probably never smell it again, and he sobs.  He thinks of the onion soup his mother makes and how he’ll probably never taste it again, and he sobs.  The gurgling of the brook near his home. Sob.  A smile on the face of Miss Randall, the teacher he's crazy-infatuated with. Sob.  Sap on his bare feet.  Sob.  Running around at recess with his friends.  Sob.  Sob sob sob sob sob, sedative, sleep, sob sob sob sob sob.  Panic panic scream scream sob.  His mentor, Lignin, is not very hopeful about his prospects.

 

It’s Lignin who gives him the little bit of hope he has to cling to, though.  “You need an ally,” Lignin tells him, right from the first.  “You’re not going to make it through without someone to help. You won’t make a bad ally –“ _if you can ever stop crying_ , Lignin thinks silently – “if you pick the right person.  You’re strong, a decent size, you know about axes and knives and surviving in the woods. There’ll be woods.”  That’s an open secret among the mentors by now, no matter how jealously each mentor tries to guard the information once it’s been passed on to them.  “You’ve got a shot, Jack.  Find yourself an ally so you don’t have to go through it alone.”

 

“But we can’t both survive.  What if – what if I have to…” Jack dissolves into tears, unable to say the rest – _What if I have to kill him?_  
 

Lignin sighs, looking at him.  “Dry up.  It probably won’t come to that.”

 

“Because I’m going to _die_ ,” Jack says, and now he’s sobbing again.

 

 _Yes, because of that_ , Lignin thinks.  But he keeps encouraging Jack, telling him alliances usually disintegrate on their own and Jack won't have to do anything to make it happen, that he just needs someone with him for the worst of it in the beginning, getting used to the arena.  What he really means is that Jack is going to dissolve into a hopeless pile of tear-diluted sludge if he doesn’t have someone to lean on at least for awhile, but he doesn’t say that, and eventually Jack stops crying, albeit with the help of something the medical staff shoot into his arm.  He’s going to have to get off that stuff before he goes into the arena, but Lignin lets it go for now, because he is really tired of all the crying.

 

So, from the very first, Jack is looking for allies.  As early as the ride around the City Circle the first day, he’s assessing the others, trying to figure out who might be able to help him through.  Over time he narrows it down. The first thing he does is to eliminate the girls from his consideration: for the last six months or so he’s barely been able to look at a girl without springing an immediate hard-on, which he doesn’t feel like dealing with every day in the arena.  As for the rest, the field of potential allies narrows pretty quickly for him – some scare him, some shun him, some are too weak.  But then he approaches Cire, from District Eight, and within the first two minutes he knows Cire is it.  He knows with Cire, he’s got the best possible chance of getting through.

 

Like Jack, Cire is a pretty big guy, strong and fast.  But the thing that draws Jack in most is that while Cire does have that strength, and a certain steeliness besides that Jack will never have, he’s as scared as Jack is, so Jack knows they understand each other and they’ll be able to help each other through. It’s there from their first conversation, lined up at the weapons training section behind the Careers.  Jack is watching them and fighting back tears because every Career seems to be able to slaughter a million dummies in ten seconds and he’s completely terrified.  But he forces the tears back – one of the medics taught him some breathing exercises that help a little bit – and turns to Cire, who’s standing next to him, and says with a ghastly shot at a smile, “Are you as scared as I am of these guys?”

 

Cire looks over at him, biting his lip, and says,  “I don’t know.  Are you about to shit your pants?”

 

“ _Yes_ ,” Jack breathes, relieved beyond measure to have found someone who gets it, and then it hits them both funny and they start laughing together. 

 

They meet up often at the different training stations together that day, and although Jack knows Cire is as scared as Jack is, Cire’s hands are steady on the weapons and his fingers are clever knotting the snares.  And terrified as he is, Jack could hardly forget all there is to know about edible plants and woodcraft, which Cire clearly admires – and they’re skills that Cire needs to have on his side to get through, too.  So when Jack asks Cire to be his ally, Cire agrees immediately.  They don’t make their alliance public, so they spend a lot of time apart during training, but just seeing Cire across the room is enough to give Jack confidence.   

 

From that time on, everything changes for Jack.  He dreams about Cire holding his hand as they rise into the arena, about them standing back to back and fending off all the terrors in the world.  He’d think he had a crush on Cire if he wasn’t still getting erections over all the girls.  But it’s not a crush.  It’s deeper than that.  It’s a _need_.  He needs someone, and Cire is it.  Cire is perfect.

 

When the training scores come out, they both pull sevens, and it further cements in Jack’s head that they’re a match made in heaven.  He tells Cire that – with a laugh, so Cire won’t think he’s a queer – and Cire smiles in a way that shows Jack that he gets what Jack means.  They eat dinner together that night, both riding high on their good scores, laughing and talking about how much better everything looks now. In the interviews, Jack admires Cire’s composure and strength and he’s thrilled, knowing that Cire’s on his side.  As Lignin predicted, having an ally has changed everything for Jack.  Whatever Jack can’t do, Cire can.  Anything that scares Jack, he can pass off in his mind to Cire – and as he does so, he finds himself assessing his own capabilities more accurately; once he knows Cire can take over the stuff Jack doesn’t know, he starts realizing all the stuff he does know.  He doesn’t let himself think any more about how only one of them can survive.  In his mind, both of them can.  In fact, as he drops off to sleep each night, he finds himself lost in a recurring fantasy where he and Cire are the last two left, but they just refuse to kill each other -- for days, weeks, as long as it takes -- and they fight off every danger the Capitol can throw at them, and eventually the Capitol has to give in and let them both live. In the daytime he knows it’s silly – but the idea is still there on some deep-down level, the idea that Jack won’t have to go through either life in the arena or life after it alone.

 

Then the plates are rising into the arena, and Jack wants to tear off as the plate is rising, smash himself against the metal walls of the surrounding cylinder again and again, howl and scream and make the plate stop somehow, but he grits his teeth and begins looking around for Cire from the second his head crests ground level.  He finds Cire about six plates over, then spends a long few seconds looking at Cire for reassurance instead of looking around the arena to figure out which Cornucopia spoils he should take.  Last night, with Lignin’s help, he worked out a plan for how he and Cire should approach the Cornucopia; two guys who got sevens in training should be able to make it through the bloodbath as long as they watch each other’s backs.  So on first rush they’ll grab predetermined weapons – Jack will need an axe or a few knives, while Cire will need a sword or a spear, so each of them will grab whichever of those they can – and then they’ll pick up some gear to protect against exposure, some medical kits, any food in easy reach, and then they’ll get out into the woods together.  With that stuff plus their pooled skills, they’ll be good.  Jack worked on the plan until it’s perfect in every detail, and Cire picked it up quickly, and now, with the minute almost up, Jack steals another quick look at Cire and he _knows_ they can do this together.  He knows it.

 

So the gong sounds and they both bolt into the Cornucopia, and they’re in luck because there’s an axe in Jack’s path and Cire gets a sword, and Jack’s been busy scouting out the rest of the supplies and as he nears Cire he begins to shout – “There’s a tent pack and a medical kit over there, go grab them, I’ll cover you –“ and that’s when Cire takes a swing at him with the sword.

 

Jack skids to a stop and stumbles back, looking wildly around him for the Career Cire must have been trying to get, but then he’s lucky that he’s still stumbling back because Cire’s sword slashes within an eighth of an inch of taking off Jack’s arm and Jack howls “What the _fuck_ , man?” and he’s still looking around for a Career because none of this makes any sense but the Careers are all occupied elsewhere and it’s just Jack and Cire, who are – Jack realizes in a horrible electric flash as Cire’s sword comes at him again – battling one another.  Cire’s sword swipes towards Jack’s abdomen and Jack fends him off with the axe and he’s looking into Cire’s face for some sign of – anything, anything of the boy that Jack knew in training, anything of his ally, but there’s nothing and the sword comes flashing in again and Jack dances backwards and fends off another blow and takes a swing himself and Cire hops out of range and comes in again and Jack dodges and then takes a wild swing with his axe that cuts Cire in half at the middle.  Cire breaks and falls to the ground in two pieces in a torrent of blood, his blood is all over Jack, and Jack is just standing there staring with his mind shrieking _What did I do?  What did I do?_

 

Then Cato’s there with the spear and then the spear’s entered Jack’s back and gone out the other side and he’s on the ground.  Jack falls so that he’s eye to eye with Cire, eye to eye that still isn’t dead – oh God, Cire still isn’t dead, not quite, and Jack tries to say _What happened_ but he can’t move and he tries to say _I’m sorry_ but he can’t move, and he’s still searching for any sign of anything in Cire’s eye, regret or compassion or even hatred, but all he can see is fear.  Jack flashes back on training and their conversation about fear at the weapons station – _Are you about to shit your pants?_ – and it’s kind of funny because Jack is pretty sure he has just shit his pants,  and a horrible laughing sob is bubbling up inside him that will never get out because he’s paralyzed, and as the last flicker of life fades out of Cire’s eye Jack’s mind is howling _why, how could you, why, Cire *_ why* -- and Jack realizes he too is about to die in the next second or so and he’s kind of grateful to Cato for it.   And then it’s over, and neither of them has to be afraid any longer. 


	15. Cire [District 8 Male]

CIRE

_District 8 male tribute, killed at the Cornucopia on the first day_

 

                Going into the Games, Cire’s biggest regret is that he didn't get married when he had the chance.  Joining Day is a District 8 tradition; people tend to marry young in Eight anyway, for the extra food ration family households get, and so “young adults” between the ages of 16 and 18 who’ve been dating their chosen partner for a year or more queue up the day before the reaping to marry, just in case… well, just in case.  The weddings are a communal affair, and the ceremonies involve not just a promise of love and faithfulness to one’s spouse but also to the others who are joined that day – all the couples are expected to offer whatever support they can to the other couples in their times of need, which, in Eight, are pretty frequent.  There’s a special feeling among the kids who marry each year at Joining Day, and the mutual care and support does tend to be carried forward into the rest of their lives.  It’s one of the few things that people love about living in Eight.  Cire likes it too, but when Calico, his girlfriend of a year and a half, asked him to marry her on Joining Day, he’d refused.

                “It’s like it’s bad luck,” he’d told her.  “Like we’re planning on getting reaped.  The whole point of Joining Day is that you get married in case you get reaped the next day.  Why do you want to think that way?  Neither one of us is getting reaped.  You don’t even have any tesserae.”

                “It’s not just about that,” Calico had said, though he could see in her eyes that it really was.  “It’s such a beautiful ceremony.  Don’t you _want_ to marry me?”

                He leaned forward and kissed her.  “I do.  I want to marry you the day you turn 19.  Marriage should be a promise between adults, not kids who’re scared of the reaping.”

                She’d tried to convince him, but it hadn’t been any use. He’d been raised superstitious and he wasn’t going to do anything to invite bad luck at the reaping.  But it turned out that bad luck didn’t need an invitation.  And now he’s standing on the stage, his mind a whirling blank, and the only thing he knows is that he can’t meet Calico’s eyes in the crowd or he’s going to lose it completely.

                They have exactly five minutes to talk in the Justice Building before he’s herded onto the train.  “I’m sorry,” he tells her, trying to look her in the eyes (dark brown and incredibly beautiful), but she’s turned her gaze away and she’s biting her lip so hard that after a second he sees a little spot of blood starting to slide down her lower lip.

                “Hey.”  He doesn’t have a handkerchief, so he takes a doily from the fancy end table next to him – the least he can do to the assholes in power is ruin their pretty decorations.  He takes her face in his hands, uses the doily to wipe the blood away gently, then kisses the little cut.  “It’ll be okay,” he tells her.  “I’ll… I’ll just win.  That’s all.”

                “Oh, _that’s_ all!” Calico cries.  “Why didn’t I think of that?  It’s so simple!  You’ll just win!”

                Cire winces, and he’s on the verge of telling her not to talk like that, it’s bad luck, before he (thankfully) gets a hold on himself and leaves the luck thing alone.  “Don’t you think I can?” he says, trying to keep his voice steady.

                She looks away from him again.  “I don’t know,” she says at last.

                “Because I can.  I’m bigger than most of the kids – how many 18-year-olds do you think get reaped each year? – and I’m strong and I’m not an idiot.  I have as much chance as anyone else.”

                She opens her mouth as if to speak, then apparently thinks better of it and closes it again.

                “And I have more reason than any of them to come home.  Because I love you,” he tells her.

                Now her eyes meet his, sheened with tears.

                “We'll get married the day I get back. I'm not going to make the same mistake twice.  We have a whole life in front of us, Calico.  No one’s going to cheat us out of that.”  While he’s speaking he can actually believe it.  Sort of.

                “Do you wish now that we’d gotten married yesterday?” she asks him.

                He sighs.  “Yes.  But that isn’t the point.”

                “What _is_ the point?” she asks, sobbing now, and then the Peacekeepers are there, shouldering through the door and taking Calico’s arm to lead her out.  Cire wastes time trying to grab her back, trying to run out after them, unable to say goodbye so soon.

                “The point is that I love you,” he calls after her, but the door is already swinging shut and he doesn’t know if she hears him.

                In preparing for the Games, his mentor Jute isn’t much help, so Cire has to work things out for himself.  What he comes up with is pretty simple: it’s all just a dream.

                That doesn’t just mean the other tributes, or the people watching; it means him, too.  The Capitol and everything in it is just a bad dream, and nothing that happens here has anything to do with reality.  So, as in a dream, he allows himself to get involved in what’s going on around him, but he carries the comfortable sense inside him that soon it’ll be over and he’ll be back in Eight with Calico. Of course, it’s not the easiest thing to maintain.  A lot of the time he’s flat terrified.  But he tries hard to transmute the fear into the undifferentiated, fleeting terror of a nightmare.  To steady himself, he pictures Calico in her wedding dress, the simple white linen sheath that’s customary for brides in Eight.  Then he goes back to learning how to swing a mace or win a duel.  There are bits of Games reality that keep trying to intrude – the Careers who dismember endless dummies in three strokes each, the kid who shared his terror the first day and keeps following him around, the bored, dissatisfied reaction of the audience to his interview.  But he closes his eyes and pulls up the image of Calico’s face so often that it’s like a photograph pinned to the inside of his eyelids.  In this world, the nightmares only come when his eyes are open.

                When the Games start something funny happens: as his platform ascends he feels himself slipping out of his body, floating up in the air to watch the scene from above. _Thank God_ , he thinks, _it really is a dream_.  He heads into the Cornucopia as planned, watching around himself for attackers, but at the start there’s nobody.  He grabs a sword and then there’s that kid from training in front of him, the one who kept going on about alliances and strategies and Cire doesn’t know what all else.  After the first five minutes Cire had tuned him out, nodding and smiling and saying “Sure” and “Mm-hmm” by rote, so it’s easy not to feel anything as the kid runs up to him with that wide-open babyish expression, shouting something about tent packs and cover.  Then Cire sees the axe in the kid’s hand and he knows the other part of the dream has started, the violent, bloody part he’s been dreading, and so he steels himself to run right into it and he takes a swing with his sword.  The kid leaps back, shrieking obscenities, and Cire takes another swing, wanting this over with, and then they’re dueling.  Cire slashes and feints and dodges and stabs with rote, mechanical precision, still watching from above.

                When he gets cut in half it’s very confusing because he’s never felt pain in a dream before, and yet he’s still out of his body, so how can it be real?  He tries to shake himself awake several times, sick of all of this, but it’s not working and there’s blood everywhere and everything feels so horribly real.  He tries to pull up Calico’s face before him again but now he’s eye to eye with the kid who cut him in half and that’s all he can see, no matter how he tries to wipe it away.  He shakes himself again, then again, and all of a sudden, mercifully, he feels the dream dissolve around him.   The blood, the pain, the kid in front of him are all receding.  The edges of his vision flutter, and then everything begins to fade out. _Thank God,_ he thinks.  Now the nightmare is over.  Now he will wake up. 

                 

                


	16. Holland [District 8 Female]

HOLLAND

_District 8 tribute, killed on day one, cut by Cato and finished off by Peeta_

 

For three days after she is reaped, Holland doesn’t have a single clear thought. She knows she’s going to die.  She knows she can’t die.  The warring concepts of life and death seem to be too big for her brain.  Distorted thoughts ricochet around: _I didn’t get to say goodbye to Stitch, he must be so sad -- I wonder if death is black or white -- I forgot to weed the garden yesterday -- how many hours till the Games start? -- if I’m very very careful maybe I’ll get to go home -- I’m supposed to be in history class -- my interview dress will probably be really pretty -- I bet dying hurts -- I bet living after the Games hurts -- how many colors will the sky turn before I never see it again? --_ on and on and on. She tries to get them straight, but she keeps throwing up and having panic attacks and crying.  She never stops crying, not for one second, through the whole train ride and through her first Capitol dinner and the session with her prep team and her stylist and through the City Circle tour.  She cries all night -- she knows this because she wakes up several times in the night and she’s still crying.  Silk, her mentor, isn’t as nice as the Seven boy’s and she won’t give Holland any sedatives or anything.  She tells Holland to toughen up.  Holland doesn’t know how to do that.  So she keeps crying.

 

After three days of this Silk has no patience left, and gets blunt. “If you don’t stop crying you’re going to die,” she tells Holland.  “Pull it together or start planning your funeral.”

 

Holland keeps crying.

 

“For fuck's sake. You're on your own,” Silk says, and stands up and leaves the room.

 

The first day of training Holland looks around the room and sees the whole deal.  She sees the Careers slaughtering dummies and sobs so loudly it’s almost a scream.  She sees the kids in hand-to-hand combat, how they’re all at least six inches bigger than her and could kill her in a second, and bends at the waist to retch into what turns out to be a trough full of fish that one of the kids is trying to learn how to spear. The fish immediately swarm around the vomit, seeing a good meal.  The cacophony of voices in her head gets much louder.  Trying desperately to push it all down, she makes herself move over to the edible plants table because it looks like the least scary place to be. She spends more time watching the boy who’s at the table with her than she does looking at the plants herself, trying not to be terrified of him.  As it happens, it’s pretty easy not to be terrified of him -- he seems calm, soft-voiced, and not likely to try to stab her.  And he keeps asking about poisonous plants.  Holland has never been accused of being the brightest bulb in the box, but eventually she figures out what he’s doing, and for the first time in days, the bolt of lightning clears her head out.

 

 _I can kill myself_ , she thinks.  _I can kill myself and it’ll be over.  I won’t have to worry anymore.  I’ll just do it.  No more of this.  I’ll just die._

The boy at the table with her seems really preoccupied with which plants will hurt him the least in dying, but Holland doesn’t think that makes a whole lot of sense.  If she just steps off her plate in the first sixty seconds she’ll be blown to pieces before she can complete her last breath.  She’s seen it happen.  The cameras don’t like to show it, but everyone’s seen it happen anyway.  She knows it’s foolproof and it’s fast.  That’s all she needs to know.

 

Whenever she gets scared after that, whenever she feels herself start to cry, she shoves everything aside except that one thought: _I’m going to kill myself.  I’m going to kill myself.  I’m going to kill myself._ And the fear recedes.

 

The funny part is that Silk, seeing how much calmer she is, is finally starting to try to mentor her.  Now it’s Holland’s turn to walk out of the room.  Silk watches her as she moves away, back rigid, and sighs.  _So she’s going to be one of those_ , she thinks. _First smart idea she’s had._

As the she rises into the arena Holland stands with her knees bent: one little hop and her whole body should be all but vaporized.  She clutches her district token, a locket her mom gave her, and hopes it, at least, will survive the blast.  She’d like her mom to get it back.  She raises her head to look at the sky, but she can’t help letting her eyes rake across the arena first.  Well, she should probably know the place where she’s going to die.

 

And then she sees the matches.

 

They’re about seven feet away from her plate.  There are three of them.  And they could change everything.

 

She thinks of everything a fire can do for you in the Games.  You won’t freeze.  You won’t make yourself sick eating raw food.  You can make a torch.  You can use it as a weapon.

 

Every person she’s ever seen win the Games has had fire.

 

Holland didn’t know until that second that she still wanted to live.  But if there’s a chance... even the tiniest chance...

 

The gong sounds and she stumbles off her plate, then gets her feet steady under her and takes off at a run.  She snags the matches and speeds off back toward the woods.  No one takes any notice of her.  She makes the edge of the woods and glances back.  They’re all killing each other.  No one is even looking her way.  All the time she spent crying in training has turned out to be a strength after all.  They’re ignoring her.  They’ll ignore her until it’s too late.

 

She sets off into the woods to find a safe spot, shoving the matches into her pocket, patting her pocket constantly as she goes.  She has the matches now.  The matches will save her life.


	17. Flax [District 9 Male]

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This chapter contains strong language.

FLAX

_District 9 male tribute, killed the first day at the Cornucopia_

 

                From the very first moments of the tour around the City Circle, sweating and trembling and mostly dazed, Flax knows just one thing for sure: he fucking hates Katniss Everdeen.

                Granted, he’s resented most of the other districts in general for a long time -- especially the ones like 12 and 11 and 8, the ones that people constantly talk about as the _poor_ districts, the pitiful, sorrow-drenched places where everything is terrible for everyone and they’re just so _oppressed_.  His fifth-grade teacher Mr. Douglas, who everyone hated, even used to say it straight out: “Be grateful for what you have, kids.  You don’t know how good you have it.  I used to work on the delivery trains.  I’ve seen what it’s like out there in the bad districts.”  Then he’d tell them all about how many kids starve in 12 every year, how many whippings and executions there are in 11, how you can hardly breathe the air in 8, it’s so polluted.  He’d talk about it all like 9 was some kind of paradise, like every time they ate a morsel of food they should think of the poor sad starving children in 12 and just sniffle and sob with gratitude.

                Man, fuck all of that. Fuck Mr. Dickface Douglas, fuck the Peacekeepers, fuck the Capitol, fuck the whole stinking country.  Nine is no fucking _paradise_.   What, like they’ve never seen a starving kid before in 9?  Like there aren’t any whippings and executions?  Like no one in 9 suffers?  Life in 9 is _made_ of suffering.  Flax isn’t interested in any bullshit some ex-train hobo wants to tell them about _gratitude_.  Shove your gratitude up your ass, Douglas.  Nine is hell.

                So when Flax sees Katniss Everdeen all lit up like the fireworks at the Defeat and Victory Day parties the Capitol makes them celebrate in May, he goes from hating her impersonally to hating her personally.  This girl is supposed to be from the worst district there is?  This girl is supposed to have it worse than him?  The boy from 12 pisses him off too, but not nearly as much as this bitch with the I’m-better-than-all-of-you, look-at-me-shine look on her face.  No one with a life as shit as Flax’s has been could ever wear that face.  He glances down over his own costume – he’s dressed as a _sheaf of wheat_ – and then glowers at Katniss, whose name he knows because people are shouting it all through the crowd.  Everyone is staring at her, her and her flames, her and her fuck-you face.  How many people have shouted Flax’s name? Exactly none.  How many people here are going to give a shit whether Flax lives or dies?  Exactly none. 

                Flax thinks he’d maybe like to fuck her himself, actually, with those full smirking lips and those smoldering eyes and all that night-black hair.  He wants to yank her head around by the hair and make her scream in pain, shove himself in deep and make her scream in ecstasy.  Then he wants to kill her. 

               Well, at least he’ll have the chance to do half of that before the Games are over.

                As the time in the Capitol goes on he hates her all the more. This girl who got an eleven in training after doing absolutely nothing but tie knots and stare at plants every day, this girl who got everyone in Panem wanting to lick her out in that interview dress, then got everyone talking about her and no one else when that stupid asshole started talking about being in love with her.  Flax doesn’t know how no one besides him can see that that’s a put-on, and it makes him angrier than ever.  Not a single thing she’s gotten here has been something she’s _earned_.  (He doesn’t know what happened in the judging session, but he knows damn well that the girl he saw in the Training Center could barely wipe her own ass after taking a shit, so he figures the judges must have just fallen in love with her like everyone else.)  She doesn’t deserve any of the attention, any of the admiration, any of the adoration she’s been getting.  He thinks back again on Mr. Douglas, talking about how _underprivileged_ the kids are in District 12, and wants to spit.  This girl is not underprivileged.  This girl has all the privileges in the world.

                Besides, Flax has noticed another important thing: the more he hates Katniss, the less room he has to be afraid.  Hate clears his head out, gives him something to obsess over besides the upcoming Games.  So he devotes everything in him to hating Katniss.  He’s lucky it’s so easy.

                As they fly to the arena to start the Games, Flax is shaking with horrible nervous energy that makes him think he might throw up, so he forces his thoughts back to Katniss.  He decides he’ll do everything he can to make her life hell before she dies.  He wants to kill her as soon as the starting gong goes, but he thinks she might be chicken enough to just bolt for the woods despite her eleven in training.  He probably won’t have the quick satisfaction of killing her immediately.  But he’ll do what he can.  She'll be his in the end.

                Then he’s in the arena and he’s so terrified that he’s afraid he’s going to vomit all over his plate for real now, which would probably set off the landmine and kill him immediately, so he trains his gaze on Katniss and tries to figure out what her first move will be.  The gong goes and she grabs something off the ground and then feints like she’s going back into the woods like he figured she would, so he does the same, tracking her, and then something changes and she’s bolting in toward the Cornucopia, so he takes off too.  He’s pumping his legs like never before, stomach churning, lungs burning, and then he sees that she’s not heading into the Cornucopia after all, she’s just headed for some backpack.  He puts on an extra burst of speed he didn’t know he had to get to the backpack before her, to take this thing that she wants away from her.  For the first time since she’s gotten here, she is not going to get something she wants.  Her fire-costumes and sexpot eyes aren’t worth anything here in the arena, and he wants her to know it. 

                They get there at the same time and grab it together.  He’s wrestling her for it, staring right into those steel-shimmer eyes, all his fury thrumming right under his skin like an electric current.  The force and energy of it make him stronger than her, way stronger, and he gives a wild yank that almost knocks her over, and then something happens, he doesn’t know what, but he feels himself sway on the spot and somehow the pack slips out of his fingers like butter and his head empties out, leaving him feeling strange and vulnerable and very afraid.  The pain rushes in on him a second later and he coughs and sees the blood spray all over Katniss’s face.  Then he’s on the ground and he realizes what’s happened, realizes someone’s cut him or speared him or knifed him in the back.  He can see his blood spreading all around him in a pool.  Then he sees Katniss’s feet pounding towards the woods, and he hears/sees a knife fly over his head and straight for her.  A sick nasty joy floods him as he realizes that knife is going to get her in the back, and then she’ll be on the ground, flopping around and screaming and choking on blood just like he is.  He thinks the knife will kill her.  He hopes it will kill her.  He doesn’t think it’s killed him – he’s not even in that much pain, there must be more pain than this in dying – but with any luck it will kill her.  And now something weird is happening to his vision, it’s bending in and out and he can’t make sense of much of what he’s seeing, but he refuses to close his eyes because if he does he might miss the moment when she falls to the ground.

                But then, even as he tries to hold onto the hate, he feels it slipping away from him, leaving him wide open to all the pain and loneliness and fear that dying brings.  He has such a sense of _waste_. There’s got to be more to his life than this.  This can’t be the end.

                In the very last moment his mother’s face flashes in front of his eyes and he grasps at it greedily, wanting to take something good with him, something kind, some kind of love.  He wonders whether that would have been a better thing to carry with him through the time in the Capitol and the first moments of the Games, but there isn’t much time to wonder.  So he just pulls the feeling close, and he thinks he can feel her arms wrapping around him, enfolding him.  He stops watching Katniss’ feet, stops watching for her to fall.

                And then he’s gone and his body is still.  Behind him, at the Cornucopia, the hatred rages on, but he’s no longer part of it. There's only one kind of peace to be found in these Games, but now it holds him in gentle arms. Now it's all over. Now he is at peace.


	18. Rye [District 9 Female]

RYE

_District 9 female tribute, killed at the Cornucopia on the first day_

 

     After she’s reaped, Rye has just a little less terror and a little more hope than most of the others going into the Games.  She might win the Games -- if she is immortal.  As she might be, if she is the Blessed. If she is the Blessed, she’ll be free of all harm.  Whether she is or not... well, it’s an open question.  But amid all the fear and dread swirling and jostling in her mind, occasionally she finds a kernel of excitement: finally, she will find out if it’s true. One way or the other -- soon she’ll _know._

     Since she was a small child, Rye has been prepared for the notion that she might -- just might -- be the sacred One of her generation, the One into whose spirit Yewe flowed while he or she was a tiny, unformed ball of cells in a mother’s womb.  The Faithful began to wonder when she was five years old and she fell headfirst into the rocky hole builders were digging as a foundation for the new school building.  The fall -- almost ten feet down -- should have killed her, but she came out with nothing but a few scrapes and a bad headache. They wondered more when she was bitten by a snake suspected to be poisonous when she was eleven and never even got sick.  Twice her life had been saved against all reason and hope.  It was possible she was the Blessed, and could never be harmed, never die.  Certainly there were some who had no doubt.  After the incident of the snakebite, the Faithful had begun leaving small offerings at her family’s door -- flowers, so rarely found in 9, or colorful, waxed pieces of string to tie her hair back with, or small bits of bread that still were probably more than a family could easily spare.  Rye was a little uneasy with it, but she didn’t know what to do about it.  Suppose she were the Blessed?  Suppose the people’s sacrifices were really bringing them nearer to the Light?

    It was her mother who put a stop to it eventually, speaking out at Gathering.  “We’ve no proof as yet that Rye is the Blessed.  Until we have, you should keep your offerings for yourselves.  We know that you need them.  If she does find one day that she is this generation’s rebirth of Yewe, she will give credit for the offerings you have made, and for the equal love you bear for your families and for the Lord.  Yewe is just and merciful.  Yewe knows your faith.”  The crowd murmured, mostly with approval.  “Is that what you believe, Rye?” Elia, always a bold-spoken woman, asked her.

    “Oh.  Yes!  Yes,” Rye said quickly. “Your families need you. I’m sure it’s best for you to feed them everything you have.”

    On that night, Rye seems to remember, a few of the Faithful were discovered out after curfew and whipped.  She felt some guilt over that -- would they have held Gathering that night if it weren’t for her?  The Faithful met irregularly, always at different times and homes, in an attempt to evade the Peacekeepers; the curfew in 9 was strict and the prohibition against religion rigidly enforced.  When Rye was small she had asked her mother why the Capitol banned religion.  Her mother had sighed and refused to answer for a long moment.  Finally she said, “We’re stronger in groups.  If we’re more loyal to each other than to the government, we’re dangerous.”

    “But we’re not like that,” Rye said, puzzled.  “We don’t talk about the government at all.  Don’t they know that?”

    “Maybe.  Maybe not,” her mother said.  After a moment, she spoke again, this time more quietly.  “They’d ban anything that gives us hope, though, Rye.  Anything that gives us solace.”

    “But _why?_   Why do they hate us so much?” Rye persisted.

    Her mother sighed again.  “I don’t know, little one,” she said, in a conversation-ending tone.   

     Rye thought her mother was probably lying, but she knew enough not to press it any further.  Whatever she needed to know, she would find out in due time.  Yewe would provide.

     When she's reaped, Rye is a hair’s-breadth away from breaking down in sobs there on the stage, but she pushes the tears back as firmly as she can and stands tall. This is a moment of challenge, and Rye has learned all her life to meet challenges with strength and courage.  If she were the Blessed, no less would be expected of her.

     And in the few minutes that she spends with her mother in the Justice Building, for the first time her mother shows no doubt at all that Rye is the Blessed.  As soon as she enters the room, before giving Rye a hug, before saying anything, she makes the sacred triangle in the air with her hands, and then kneels before Rye, making the motions of pouring ash on her head.

     “No, Mama!” Rye cries.  “Mama, _please..._ ”  She can’t stand the formality, the mark of the sacred.  She doesn't feel sacred.  She's a 13-year-old girl who wants her mother. 

     “I can’t do it, Mama,” she says, and she starts to cry.

     “Oh, Rye. My baby.  My girl,” her mother says, and pulls Rye into her arms.  For what seems a long time Rye cries into her mother’s shirt, all thoughts of Yewe aside.

     Finally her mother pulls her gently away and looks her straight in the eyes.  “I believe now, Rye.  I know it.  You are the Blessed.”

     “How can you know that?” Rye cries.  “There’s no way to know!  Not until someone tries to kill me, and how... _how_...” In that moment Rye can’t believe at all that she might be the Blessed, Host to Yewe.  All she is is a girl, and if someone spears her or stabs her or crushes the breath out of her, she will die.

     “Rye.  Listen,” her mother says, her eyes bright.  “You’ve been selected.  You’re going to bring knowledge of Yewe to the world.”

     “How am I supposed to do that?” Rye asks, tears still streaming down her face.

     “They’ll see it.  No matter what happens to you, no matter what the other tributes do to you, you won’t die.  Don’t you see what that will do?  No one could _not_ believe, seeing that!  And all of Panem will know who you are, and in your interviews you’ll tell everyone about Yewe, about the Faith.  Hardly anyone beyond 9 knows Yewe now, but in just a few weeks they all will!  And who knows what that will do?  You know about the War of Hosts, the predictions of the Book of Light.  The last seven generations of Yewe’s Hosts will rise from their chosen places of rest and they’ll lead their armies -- _you’ll_ lead _your_ armies -- against the evil of the world.  You’ll usher in the Thousand Years of Light, Rye, you’ll --“

     “I can’t do any of that!” Rye cries.  “I’m not the Blessed, Mama!  I can’t be!  I’m just... I’m just me!  How can I...”

     Her mother pulls her close again and kisses her forehead. “Your life is Yewe’s, Rye, like all of ours.  This is what He’s chosen for you.  Keep faith in Him and you’ll find your strength.”

     “I’m so scared,” Rye says, and breaks down into sobs again.

     Her mother pulls Rye’s head to her chest, rocking Rye in her lap.  “I know, baby.  But you’ll be okay.  You’ll see. Just believe.”

     So Rye tries to believe.

     In the first few days in the Capitol, she doesn’t know how to think straight enough to hold on to belief.  Everything’s so foreign, so insane.  Her prep team strips her naked and scrubs her skin off.  Her stylist straps her into a shimmering wheat-sheaf costume.  Her mentor drinks too much to pay any attention to her.  Everything’s too bright, too shiny; nothing looks real.  Rye tries to pray, but there’s too much crowding into her head, and she can’t find anything to say but the First Prayer: _God of Light, Sun and Star, Source of all grace, Thy strength is the strength of a thousand generations; we pray Thee, bless us with all gifts precious, fill us with Thy holy Light._   The first prayer every child learns at Gathering, but they’re the only words Rye seems to be able to remember right now.

     After a few days in the Capitol things are beginning to seem less strange, easier to live in, but Rye still doesn’t know what she’s to do.  Shouldn’t she have gotten some guidance from Yewe by now?  Maybe she’s not praying enough.  Maybe she doesn’t have enough faith.  She has to be better!  There has to be more she can do!

     She decides she’ll begin doing all she can with the time she has left before the Games begin.  She begins the traditional fast, one portion of bread per day from one morning’s sunrise to the next day’s sunset, and she begins the Ritual of Seven -- twenty-one repetitions of each of the seven sacred prayers of sorrow and redemption.  When she’s finished those, she clears her mind and opens it to Yewe’s guidance.

     She begins to feel Him move in her.

     The thing she’s been most worried about is -- how can she know if she’s the Blessed? If she is, if she is immortal, she’ll have to throw herself in the face of danger in the arena, so that the ignorant will be forced to believe.  But if she isn’t... Rye can’t stand the terror that floods her at that thought.  She’s tried to quell it, tried to put it aside, tried to pray it away, but she just can’t.  She thinks of the cruelty the Careers so often show to their victims.  Often, they kill by slow torture.  Rye knows she can’t face that.  And Yewe isn’t helping her, isn’t removing a single bit of her fear.  That must mean that there’s another way -- a way to test her immortality without throwing herself into the hands of the Careers.

     Slowly, the answer steals into her mind.  She’ll have to put it to the test before she goes into the arena.

     She’s a little doubtful at first -- some believe suicide is a sin -- but the idea grows in strength and color in her mind until she knows it’s truly from Yewe.  If she isn’t immortal, then committing suicide before the Games begin will simply spare her the pain and suffering of a longer death in the arena.  And if she is immortal, then she’ll know, and she’ll show all of Panem the strength and mercy of Yewe.

     She decides she’ll jump off the roof.

     Standing on the edge, looking a hundred stories down to the distant blur of the street, her heart is hammering so fast and she’s shaking so hard that she’s afraid she’s going to faint.  She can’t do that.  This has to be her choice, not an accident.

     So she jumps.

     For a moment she feels suspended at the top of her jump, and then she begins to fall.  Free-fall.  She falls meters in a second.  And then -- and then --

     -- and then she is thrown back on the roof.

     She looks down at her body in wonder, touches her legs, her arms, her face to make sure she’s still there.  Then she falls to her knees and presses her face into the cold stone of the roof, chanting blessings, trembling like a leaf, full of a sense of humility and holiness all at once.  She knows now.  She is the Blessed.  Nothing can kill her.  Nothing can harm her.  And she has been chosen to bring the Faith of Yewe to the world.  She can’t believe she’s worthy, but she knows it’s so.  She is the Blessed.  And she is immortal.

     Rye doesn’t remember anything about her training, anything about her interviews, anything that happens in the rest of the time at the Capitol at all.  Her eyes are so bright, her cheeks so flushed, that the medics take her temperature several times, thinking she has a high fever.  It’s normal, of course.  It’s her mind that’s fevered now.

     When she’s poised on her plate and the gong rings to start the Games, she runs for the Cornucopia as fast as she can.  She doesn’t really need to run -- she could stroll in there whistling a hymn if she wanted -- but she goes with the instinct anyway.  Her instincts can always be trusted now.  Someone throws a spear at her, but she dodges it instantly -- again, not really knowing why; the spear would fly through her like a bird through a mist, but she’s still going on instinct.  She makes it to the Cornucopia and decides to go inside, just around the bend, to see what’s going on and what she can take from here.  She sees a sword, a weapon sacred to Yewe, and some clear packs full of food.  She’ll only go for what she wants to have in order to survive the Games -- it’s taken her a second to remember the command of Yewe not to put His powers to the test, which is almost certainly why her instinct told her to run and to dodge.  She interprets the command to mean she should behave just as she would if she were not immortal.  Yewe will guide the would-be deathblows to her as He chooses.

     She studies the situation one moment longer, trying to ignore the carnage, all the blood, all the screams, all the mutilated flesh.  The sword.  The food.  And near the entrance she sees a tent pack.  Those are the things she needs, she decides.  So she goes out to get them.

     She gets the tent pack and pulls it on over her shoulders.  She gets the bag of food.  It’s when she’s headed for the sword that she’s cut down.

     One of the boys did it, she’s not sure which one, a cut straight across her abdomen.  The experience is strange: she feels pain, she thinks she feels herself fall first to her knees, then to the ground, but it can’t be, she’s the Blessed.  She shakes her head to regain her focus and keeps on running toward the sword.  She feels confused: she can see the ground passing beneath her feet, see the sword getting closer, but she seems to feel her body still on the ground, seems to feel her insides shifting, something slipping out of her.  And the pain.  Dear Lord, the pain.  Perhaps it’s someone else’s pain, she thinks, desperately trying to come up with explanations for this.  Perhaps the Blessed must feel others’ pain even as her own passes her by.  She’s never heard anything like that, but it must be so.  What else could it be?

     She sees herself reach the sword and she tries to pick it up, but her fingers seem to swipe straight through it and she can’t feel it in her hand.  And now the pain is overwhelming -- Yewe, why?  What is Your plan?  Lord, Sun, Father, Yewe, _why is this happening?_  She hears her own screams amid all the other screams, sees nothing but blood and corpses and murder all around her, and she’s trying to pray but she can’t find any words of her own, so she falls back on the simplest prayer, the prayer of her childhood, the prayer of innocence: _God of Light, Sun and Star, Source of all grace, Thy strength is the strength of a thousand generations; we pray --_

     Then everything fades away.

     At home, her mother watches the rest of the bloodbath, waiting for Rye to get up, an aura of light around her, and show the world her miracle.  Eventually the cannons go off and the cameras cut to a face that appears to be Rye’s, a face that appears to be dead, and the hovercraft takes it away, but although the grief and horror are fighting to get through, Rye’s mother tries to drown it in prayer and ritual and faith.  Perhaps Yewe’s plan is for her to arise again in the Capitol, where she can walk amid the unbelieving.  Who knows what Yewe’s plan is?  Rye’s mother only knows, as she stares at Rye’s face in the televised sky that night, that whatever Yewe’s plan is, it isn’t this.

     For the rest of her life, right up to the moment of her death, Rye’s mother still believes that Rye will come back to her again, haloed in sacred Light, bearer of the Spirit of Yewe.  She’ll come back through the door in a dazzle of holiness and the world will right itself once more.  She’ll come back.  She must come back.  Rye the Blessed, Rye her daughter, will come back.

 


	19. Tarin [District 10 Male]

TARIN

  
_District 10 male tribute, killed on day 8, cause of death unexplained_  

 

        When Tarin is reaped, a disappointed murmur runs through the crowd, but it’s subdued, and Tarin knows no one is going to break down on his account.  There’s no one to turn pale, no one to cry, no one to faint or shriek; he steals a quick look at the preceptors of the community home, but their faces are granite-hard and there’s no hope of sympathy there.  Fem Mollow, one of the preceptors on the ward next to his, is muttering what he suspects are curses under her breath, but he knows it’s not from any care for him on her part.  She was hoping for a win this year, against all sense and logic -- she’s been feeding the stronger kids in the Home extra for weeks, hoping one of them would be reaped and strong enough to give the Careers a run for their money.  Right.  The extra food they got came out of the rations of kids like Tarin, so now he’s scrawnier than ever as well as crippled.  Mollow won’t be eating well on Parcel Day this year.

          When he’s led into the Justice Building Tarin knows no one will come to say goodbye to him, and nobody does.  Looking around the room, he sees a little corner shielded from view by a large overstuffed chair and resists the urge to creep in behind it and curl up out of view.  A hidey-hole.  It seems to Tarin that he’s spent half his life curled up in hidey-holes.  It’s spared him more than a few beatings over the years.  But it’s not going to help him through this moment.

          Tarin’s been hiding since he was seven, when his family’s home burned down.  His parents and two sisters burned as well.  In the roar of the flames and choking billows of smoke, Tarin leapt up and hid in the kitchen closet, lightheaded from the fumes, thinking maybe the fire wouldn’t find him there. The kitchen roof caved in soon after that,;one of the beams crushed his foot, and the pain jarred him back to his senses.  Somehow he managed to stumble outdoors, only to find that none of the rest of his family were waiting for him there.  That was the last time he picked a bad hiding spot.

          The thick cluster of shrubs near the boundary fence for the Home, the little crawl space behind the mazes of pipes in the boiler room, the space underneath the back stairs that you could slip into through the rotted boards at the side: those were his favorite hiding places, and they worked well for him.  The little kids hid under beds and in closets sometimes, as stupid as he’d been at their age, and sometimes, seeing the terror in their eyes as they were dragged out by some preceptor or other and the pain in their eyes as they nursed a twisted wrist or bruised temple later, he wanted to tell them about some better spots, spots they wouldn’t get dragged out of, spots where they’d be safe.  But if he gave away any of his hidey-holes soon everyone would know about them and he wouldn’t be safe there himself.  So he learned his second good trick, the trick of letting his eyes glaze and his mind drift somewhere else when he comes across someone else’s pain.

          He thinks both of those skills are likely to come in handy at the Games.

          Tarin knows that no matter what he does, he’ll never have any sponsors, so he doesn’t waste his time in the Capitol trying to pull a high training score or captivate people with his interview.  He checks out some edible plants and insects, tries to determine from the selection what he’s going into.  Once he’s narrowed it down he wanders around to each of the trainers in turn: “I hear we’re heading into a desert,” he tells one, and she laughs.  “Man, we're in a jungle this year? Of all the damn things,” he says to another one, and he laughs.  “I hear the District Nine kids are going to have an edge this year -- all that grain,” he tells another one, and she furrows her brow and says sharply, “Where’d you hear that?”, then forces a laugh and goes on -- “The rumors that go around with you kids are ridiculous.  You’ll find out what you’re facing the day you get into the arena.”  So now he knows.

          So he learns about edible grains and grasses and flowers and anything else that he figures might be useful in that kind of setting.  One of the first things he learns is that raw grain is basically inedible, and since he's unlikely to pick up a pot for boiling water even if he managed to get a fire started, he passes that off. There are a bunch of types of grass in the same compartment as the grain at the station, though, so he double-checks with the trainer that they'd grow in similar soil and climate as the grain and then settles down to learn everything he can about them. His mentor has already told him that part of the arena will be wooded as well, but he knows he’ll never make it in the woods, crashing around with his crippled foot, tripping over branches and roots and stones and announcing his location to every other tribute in a half-mile radius.  Still, when his plate rises into the arena he’s closest to the woods, so he drops to his hands and knees and begins to crawl in that direction.  He’s not really any faster on hands and knees than he is on foot, but he’s seen the Careers in training -- Clove throwing knives into the backs or hearts of dummies, Cato disemboweling them, Glimmer sending arrows through their jugulars -- and he knows if he’s on hands and knees they won’t have much to aim at from a distance, and none of them are going to waste time pursuing a skin-and-bones crippled kid.  He makes it into a dense growth of shrubs not too different from the one at the Home, which calms his nerves a little, and watches the Careers for a few hours, trying to catch what he can of their plans and strategies.  When they head out into the woods to hunt that night and the Three kid is busy digging up the mines (what’s up with that?  Three, electronics -- does he know how to start them back up or something?), he crawls a little ways into the woods on his belly, finds himself a branch big enough to use as a walking stick, then makes his way cautiously around the edge of the woods until he makes it into the grassy area.  He finds himself a patch of barley grass with a convenient little spring-fed pool near it and makes a decent meal.  Then he folds his jacket into a pillow and settles down to sleep.

          He wakens that night to the sound of someone crashing through the grasses near him and freezes, hoping they’ll miss him, but then Thresh is right there in front of him -- oh shit, oh shit, oh _shit_ \-- and Tarin’s lifted into the air by one of Thresh’s giant hands.  “I’m setting up here.  I want this place,” Thresh says, and then throws Tarin back to the ground.  Tarin begins to try to scramble backwards, terrified, and knowing all the while that he won’t make it, that this is the end; he hears stupid sobs coming out of his mouth, mingled with pointless begging, and he’d like to close his mouth around them and keep them buttoned up, but when he tries he finds himself hyperventilating.  Lightning-flash images of his own death crowd into his view -- Thresh strangling him, smashing him to pieces with the mace Tarin sees in his belt, slicing him open with that serrated knife next to it that's as long as a short sword -- and for a minute he can’t see anything in reality.  He grinds his hands into his eyes fiercely and the images clear out, and he sees Thresh staring down at him in disgust.

          “Get out of here,” Thresh says, and he gives Tarin a nudge in the side with his foot that’s just short of a kick.

          Tarin knows he should be pulling himself to his feet, staggering off as fast as he can, but Thresh’s words, ironically, have left him paralyzed with confusion.  “What?” he says blankly.

          Thresh gives him a full-on kick in the side this time, his patience already exhausted.  “Get out.  If you’re around at the end I’ll kill you then.”

          Tarin goes, as quickly as he can manage.  He has to find a hiding place.

          The problem is he can’t find any more edible grasses, or edible anything.  He wanders here and there, seriously weakened by hunger and by thirst within the first day.  Eventually he finds a little clearing, surrounded by tall grass so it's invisible to anyone further than five feet away, with a pond half-covered by lily pads and a thick coating of algae.  It's the best place to hide that he's found so far, anyway.  He doesn’t have anything to purify the water with, so he lies down at the edge of the pond that's farthest from the clumps of algae and drinks.  It gives him the runs within an hour, leaving him shaking and weak, but it’s better than thirsting to death, so he stays there for the time being, sick and exhausted and completely incapable of trying to find anything else. The next day, dizzy from hunger, he tries eating the lily pads; in training they said lily pads and roots could make a good meal if you boiled them, but that's not happening, so he tries them raw.  He manages to keep them down, at least, but it barely takes the edge off his hunger.  The next day, desperate, he does force himself to drag himself around trying to find something better, but although he finds a few dandelions and a little patch of wheatgrass, there’s no water within a half mile and the wheatgrass isn't even edible unless it's soaked in water first, so he has to return to his pond. Dandelions, wheatgrass, and raw lily pads are not an ideal diet, especially when raw pond water is making you shit most of it out.  By the time he's been in the arena a week he’s certain he’s lost at least five pounds, and he didn’t have a spare pound to lose when he came in.  After a few days he has to crawl on hands and knees to get to the much-depleted patch of wheatgrass, too dizzy to rise to his feet.  A few days after that he’s spending most of his time lying with his head in the mud of the bank of the pond, his limbs as heavy as wet concrete, too weak to move.

          On what he thinks is his eighth day in the arena, the Gamemakers must decide that he’s being too boring -- he’s surprised they didn’t decide it earlier; the lack of interest he stirred up in the Capitol may have been to his advantage, keeping the cameras off him -- and they send in a windstorm full of little grains of something that looks like sand but which cuts his skin open, grain by grain, leaving him covered in blood and screaming in pain.  Adrenaline gives him new strength and he crawls away as fast as he can, squinching his eyes shut to protect them from the storm, moving blind.  He realizes too late that he’s being driven straight into Thresh’s territory, but there’s nothing he can do about it now.  Sure enough, as soon as Thresh crashes out of his patch of barley and nearly trips over Tarin, the windstorm stops.  Tarin collapses to the ground, covered in a million tiny cuts and dripping with blood.  He throws up on the ground, then keeps throwing up because he can’t move his face out of the vomit.  Eventually he manages to roll over on his side, crying so hard his breath is hitching in his chest, making him hyperventilate again.  Thresh looks him over, taking in the skin draped loosely over the bones of his bare arms, the dents at his temples where the flesh has disappeared and the skin has caved in.  The kid has shit and piss all over his pants because he hasn’t been able to move to get to the ditch that he dug for a toilet, and he's got thin, bile-colored vomit from his face to his ribs.  He’s shaking so hard he looks like he’s having a seizure.  The tear tracks on his face are the only bits of his skin not covered in blood.

          Thresh says to him, “You want me to kill you?”

          After a second, Tarin nods.

          Thresh makes it quick.

          


	20. Jersey [District 10 Female]

JERSEY

_District 10 female tribute, killed at the Cornucopia on day one_

 

                From the first moment Jersey lays eyes on the Capitol, with its lights so dazzling they hurt her eyes and glassed-in buildings and pavement in brighter colors than she ever could have imagined, she thinks _If everything here is like this, I can make it through_.

                In that first brief circuit through the center of the city, she drinks in every drop of what the Capitol has to offer her. The hordes of absurd-looking creatures screaming at her, their costumes and hair and faces so painted and reshaped that it’s hard to remember they’re human.  Everything is in amped-up, oversaturated versions of every color she’s ever seen -- colors of the sky and sun at sunrise, noon, sunset, midnight, colors of new grass and wildflowers and flame and fresh blood.  As they near the center of the city things get wilder and more intense, bewildering instead of attractive.  The lights here are so glaring that they blot out the sky, as though it’s an eternal noon in this place that sanity forgot.  Advertisements flash madly on the fronts of all the buildings.  Jersey doesn’t understand any of the ads [MAKE HIM LOVE YOU AT FIRST TOUCH WITH OUR JUVENESCENCE PLASMA PEEL, NEW FROM EUPHORIA!” – “SICK OF VOMITING AT MEALS? COME TO GENESIS RESTAURANT AND LET US REMOVE THE EXCESS AS YOU EAT WITH OUR PATENTED CUISI-SUC TECHNOLOGY” “NEED A BOOST? POP A PEP-SEN AND FLOAT ON AIR FOR 24 HOURS!” “MAKE LOVE FOR HOURS WITH REGNA ER -- NEW QUICKMELTS™ ACTIVATE WITHIN SECONDS”] but she studies them as if there’s going to be a test on them, focusing in hard on every one until the flashing colors make her feel dizzy.  When she closes her eyes she sees the words imprinted across the inside of her eyelids in negative colors, random blotches of light edging in at the sides.  She opens them as soon as she can and cranes her neck to try to see the tops of the buildings.  She can’t make out most of them, but she lets her eyes travel over the length of them as they ascend into the sky. It looks like you could turn the world on its side and walk on them like roads.  Turning the world on its side isn’t a bad metaphor for what’s happened to her, but she pushes the thought out of her mind and sucks in the lights and the colors and the screaming and the speed as quickly as she can.  She is not here for the Hunger Games.  She is not here to fight to the death with other children.  She’s here for this moment, this moment so overwhelming that she can lose herself in it completely with just a little effort.  She’s following the mantra of her childhood: _don’t think about it._

               Jersey’s family had always been poorer than most, but when she was nine her father, unable to face the hollow cheeks and pleading eyes of his family for one more day, had tried to steal a few steaks out of one of the slaughterhouses. He was found out and executed. Her mother’s meager pay couldn’t come near to stretching to four kids, and even though each of the kids picked up their five tesserae as soon as they were old enough, there were still plenty of weeks when they ate one meal a day, plenty of cold winter nights when the family's two threadbare blankets did nothing to keep the children's teeth from chattering, plenty of times that one or another of them fainted from hunger. The rule was that anyone who fainted got one extra meal a day for three days. That had to be taken out of the others’ rations, so it wasn’t too uncommon for another one or two of them to faint soon after. These were the times when their mother would disappear for several hours at night and come back clutching a handful of worn fifty-cent pieces, her eyes as dull and flat as the coins. And through it all, the motto that their mother drummed into their heads remained the same: don’t think about it. Drink water until you feel like you’ll burst and don’t think about the hunger. Snuggle closer to your sister in bed and don’t think about the cold. Keep your eyes as blank as mine and don’t think, for God’s sake don’t think, about where I go at night. Think of the warm sun, think of bright flowers in the fields, think of that boy you have a crush on, but do not think about the pain. There was no complaining in their home, the children frightened into silence. And eventually they all learned.

               Jersey clings to the lesson like a lifeline now.

                When they get out of the train and are herded into their new living quarters (the last she’ll ever see, but _don’t think about it)_ things get quieter, but only a little bit less strange.  Her prep team pull her body hair out by the roots and make her soak in stuff that makes her feel like her skin is on fire and then scrub all the skin off, but she welcomes the pain.  It gives her something to focus on.  Her prep team are impressed by how stoic she is – “most of them cry!” one says delightedly – but she’s letting the pain make her head spin and her knees weak, because it’s better to be lost in pain than to think about the things she’s not thinking about.  When her stylist comes in it’s clear within two minutes that he’s an idiot, as he straps her into some hairy red costume covered in splotches of silver and gold – does he think this is what a cow looks like?  But she runs her hands over the costume in satisfaction and smiles and waves on the chariot because the less like her real life this is, the better.

                That night she pushes herself to stay awake as long as possible because she’s afraid of nightmares.  She goes into the closet and starts pulling out dress after dress, piling up shirts and slacks and skirts and more items that she doesn’t have a name for.  She holds each one for long moments, stroking the fabric, tracing the edges and seams of the cloth with one finger. There are clothes that feel like cat’s fur and clothes whose fabric slips through her fingers like water. Clothes that catch the light and shimmer in different colors as she runs them through her hands. Clothes covered with gorgeous sparkling jewels, the first time she's ever seen a jewel outside of TV.  She sifts through them until her eyes are grainy and sleep pulls her down, and she falls asleep comforted by the images of all that luxury, but she still wakes up screaming a few hours later from a nightmare of being torn from her family’s arms and thrown into a pit of snakes.  She needs to get rid of the dream immediately and she hops out of bed and begins ordering food from her room’s mouthpiece randomly: stuffed mushrooms, shrimp cocktails, crème brulee, asparagus spears in phyllo dough, a whole roast chicken that’s been genetically manipulated until it’s the perfect size for a single person.  The only thing she won’t order is steak. She eats until she’s sick and then runs to the bathroom to throw up and then goes back to eating because the only other option is to go to bed and she’s worried she’ll have the nightmare again.  Eventually, exhausted, she falls asleep on the velvet carpet.  It’s almost as thick as her bed at home anyway.

                The problem with all the craziness of the Capitol is that she adjusts to it quickly, making her seek out new weirdness every day.  The next morning she pushes all the buttons in the shower and finds herself almost buried under a pile of variously scented bubbles and gels.  It isn't the best experience ever, but that night she gets busy pushing all the rest of the buttons in the room.  They tilt the bed, change the color and brightness of the lights, make a TV emerge from a cabinet in the wall, make a whirlpool bath rise out of the floor.  One of the buttons makes a weird oblong thing about ten inches long rise out of the seat of the chair across the room and then makes the chair vibrate.  The creepiest one is the one that makes a strange X-shaped metal thing about the height of a person rise out of the floor, with handcuffs at each of the four ends of the X.  A whip and a blindfold dangle from the center of it.  Jersey has no idea what it’s for but it terrifies her.  She presses the button again quickly, sending it back into the floor, and starts playing with the lights again.

                Within a few days, despite all the food and clothing and buttons and diversions, a sense of desperation is beginning to creep out of the corners of Jersey’s mind, where she’s sworn not to look, and into her main view.  Everything on the TV is about the Hunger Games, excited, nonstop babble about the fun Games where 23 children will be killed ( _don’t think about it)._  Everything inside and outside her room is becoming faintly nauseating.  Every day her escort drops her off at training and every day she leaves as quickly as possible, but now she’s running out of things to do.  She’s not allowed out of the Training Center to explore the city.  She’s not allowed to talk to any of the servers.  Springer, her mentor, has been stupefied drunk the entire time they’ve been in the Capitol.  She can’t talk to Tarin, who will be dead along with her in a few days ( _don’tthinkaboutit)_ or her prep team and stylist, who are idiots preparing her for the slaughter ( _don’tthinkaboutit)_.  She’s having nightmares every night now.  They’re getting worse.  She wakes up screaming, but no one comes.  She has no one.

                Beyond desperate now, she gets out of bed one night at eleven o’clock – she managed an hour and a half of sleep before the image of herself being butchered at the slaughterhouse jarred her awake, shrieking – and leaves her room to go find someone, she doesn’t know who.  She wants to find an Avox who will bring her warm milk.  She wants to find a server – maybe that brunette one about her age -- and ask them to serve her by tucking her in and singing her a lullaby.  Anyone.  Anyone who can distract her, help her, make her feel less alone.

                The person she winds up finding is Springer, crashed out on the sofa in front of the fire in the dining hall’s anteroom downstairs.  Nothing but complete desperation could lead Jersey to sit down beside Springer, touch her shoulder, shake her awake.  She hates Springer.  But Springer’s been through this too.  Maybe she can offer something.  Some help.  Some company.

                Springer yells as she comes awake, raising her hands to defensive posture, and Jersey jumps out of the way immediately, already regretting this.  Springer spies her half-sprawled on the floor and manages to still her limbs, but she’s still shaking.  “What the hell do you want?” she cries.  Jersey closes her eyes – what the hell _does_ she want?  What is she doing here? And the problem is that Springer’s accent is the accent of home, so different from the Capitol voices Jersey has been hearing for days, and this small detail breaks through her already-thinning armor of not thinking about it and she begins to cry.

                She’s buried her face in her arms because she’s so ashamed, and it’s a long time before Springer speaks again.  When she does, her voice carries embarrassment and impatience intermingled.  “What do you want?” she asks Jersey again, a little bit more nicely.

                Jersey raises her head, fighting as hard as she can to keep the tears back.  It works a little.  She tries to find the words but nothing comes.  Finally she whispers: “I don’t know what to do.”

                Springer’s face is blank.

                “What do I do?” Jersey says, her voice unsteady, still fighting back tears.

                After a long moment, Springer shrugs and reaches out towards Jersey in a rough movement.  Jersey scrambles back, thinking Springer is about to hit her, but instead Springer picks up a bottle of liquor from the table.  “Here,” she says, and shoves it into Jersey’s hands.  “Now get out of here.”  She slumps back into the couch again and closes her eyes.  Jersey looks down at her hands.  A little bit of the liquor has sloshed over the rim of the bottle, wetting her hand.  The heavy, ugly smell of alcohol fills the air.

                Jersey takes the bottle back to her room, and after some consideration she puts it to her mouth and takes a few big swigs.  She drops it to the carpet immediately, spilling it all over the place, coughing and gasping.  Eventually the coughing passes.  Jersey sits there, staring at the bottle on the carpet, the stained carpet around it. 

                After a few minutes she starts to feel lightheaded.  She considers the feeling for a moment and decides that she likes it.  So she picks up the bottle and downs what’s left of it.  Things get fuzzier, and now an amazing thing is happening – the world is getting blotted out.  She stumbles across the carpet and orders a bottle of whiskey, the only type of alcohol she knows a name for, through the mouthpiece.  It appears in minutes.  She drinks it fast.  It tastes much better after the next few swigs.  She drinks half of the new bottle and then flops into bed and takes a long fall into sleep.  She wakes up in the middle of the night and throws up.  She takes another swig of the alcohol and goes back to sleep.

                Liquor changes everything for Jersey.  She stumbles through the next few days shitfaced drunk. It’s so easy not to think about home, or anything else, when she’s drunk.  She knows everyone is rolling their eyes at her and she doesn’t care.  She heads into the judging session drunk and sits down at the camouflage station, drawing pretty patterns on her arms and legs with berry juice for the full fifteen minutes.  When she gets her score of one later that night, she laughs her head off, and Tarin moves away to get away from the foul gust of alcohol fumes riding her breath.  At her interview with Caesar Flickerman she falls twice ascending to the stage in her heels, then, slurring, refuses to talk to him about anything but the clothes and the food in the Capitol, ignoring him every time he tries to steer into more personal material.  Her stylist has put her in a clinging dress that’s the color of medium-rare steak, which is the only thing that’s gotten to her in days.  As soon as she gets back to her room she rips it off and throws it into the fireplace, but it takes her quite awhile to remember which of the buttons turns the fire on.  She ends up with the whirlpool running in the middle of the room and the lights bright red and pulsating.  She orders another bottle of whiskey, drinks three-quarters of it, then drunkenly decides to try out the whirlpool.  She tries to step in but she slips and winds up face-first in the water.  She realizes hazily after a moment that she’s drowning, and drags herself up over the edge of the pool and falls asleep with her head on the concrete.  When she wakes up, she wonders why she bothered to pull herself out.

                On the morning of the Games she’s as drunk as a skunk.  She falls asleep on the hovercraft ride to the arena and only wakes up a little when her stylist begins trying to wrestle her into her clothes.  She starts to laugh at that, and then throws up all over the floor.  That isn’t good.  When she throws up it means the alcohol is getting out of her system and that means she might be less drunk when she gets there and she _cannot_ be sober because she can’t deal with this oh shit she can’t deal with this –

                “Let’s see you stand up,” her stylist says,  and pushes her into an upright position.  She sways on the spot, but manages to stay standing.  “Good,” he says, wiping vomit off her face, then guiding her to her plate.  “Just stay there.  Stand up.”

                “It’ll be over soon?” she says suddenly, her words still a garbled mess.

                After a second, her stylist nods.  “Yeah.  It will be.”

                Jersey holds onto that promise as her plate rises into the arena.  But once she’s up there things get confused again, as her gaze travels blearily from tribute to tribute around the circle.  She’s supposed to be doing something, but what?  She’s going to die if she doesn’t do it.  Does she want to die?  She’s sixteen.  How can she die?  There are all these things scattered around on the ground and she thinks she’s supposed to get them, or something.

                And then, out of nowhere, she sees the faces of her family, huddled around the television, eyes wide and terrified.  She’s going to die?  She can’t die. The _don’t think about it_ refrain runs through her head again in a singsong, but she’s not really sure what it means anymore.  She doesn’t want to die.  She doesn’t want her family to watch her die.  She has to go home.  And all of this is a bad dream, right?  It makes no sense.  She shakes her head and sways on the plate.  And then a gong goes off and everybody starts running.

                She stares around for a minute and then stumbles forward.  There’s something on the ground near her, a black pile that looks like shiny crumpled cloth.  So shiny.  It’s Capitol wear.  She wants the shiny Capitol wear.  She wants to do the right thing and not die.  She manages a few steps and then falls down.  She lies there for a minute, face in the dirt, and then gets to her hands and knees and begins to crawl toward the thing.  Her fingers close around it.  It’s so soft and silky.  She pulls it close to her and tries to get up.

                Clove runs by her and cuts her throat, and she falls to the ground with her face in a pool of blood.  She closes her eyes and starts choking and coughing like she did when she almost drowned in the whirlpool.  This time she finishes drowning. 

               At home, her mother faints for the second time in three days.


	21. Rue [District 11 Female]

RUE

_District 11 female tribute, killed by Marvel on day 9_

            From the first time she sees Katniss, shoving her little sister behind her as she volunteers to take her place, Rue can’t stop thinking about her.  She’s so beautiful, so strong, so passionate in her love for her sister – Rue can’t think of anyone who she could even imagine taking her own place at the reaping.  She loves Katniss’s wiry limbs and athletic build, loves the spark in her eye as she stands rigidly on the stage, looking out over the crowd with steadiness and self-possession.  To Rue she seems ten times more alive than any of the other tributes, more alive than almost anyone else Rue has ever met.  She makes Rue think of Quince, the head of the evening shift Rue works on – the flush of life in her face, the confidence of her every movement, every word.  Rue stuck to Quince constantly, always running and slipping around people to be the first in line, to stand close to Quince and feel the heat of her smile.  With Quince as her leader, Rue worked twice as hard as anyone else, taking leaps from tree to tree she’d never have tried otherwise, yearning to see Quince smile at her, maybe even call out a compliment.  On her boldest day, she gathered a bunch of wildflowers and bound them with twine, then presented them shyly to Quince.  She obsessed over it for awhile before she managed to make herself do it – what if Quince thought she was weird? What if she turned away and never looked at Rue again? But Quince loved them, told Rue what a sweetheart she was.  Gave her a spontaneous hug.  Rue floated on air for the rest of the day, still feeling Quince’s arms around her, still hearing her voice: _such a sweetheart._   That night, falling asleep, Rue imagined Quince putting the bouquet of flowers in a glass, arranging them nicely.  Thinking of Rue.  Rue put in a lot of rue flowers.  Quince would smile as she arranged the flowers, that beautiful smile that lit up her whole face.  Thinking of Rue.  She felt like her veins were filling with warm liquid gold, like she’d float out of the bed wrapped in rainbows.  She fell asleep to dream of Quince holding Rue in her arms, pressing her cheek against Rue’s, kissing Rue softly on the cheek, the temple, grazing past Rue’s lips as she kissed her on the shoulder. When Rue woke up her whole body was throbbing with a kind of pleasure she had no name for. And yearning.  There’s something more, something she wants, something better even than the dream. But she doesn’t know what it is, so it seems there’s no hope of getting it.  

        It's not as if Rue is one of those girls who falls in love with other girls -- she can't remember the name for it right now, but she knows a few women like that.  They're not allowed to marry each other by Capitol law, but they live together, they kiss and hold each other, they seem so happy in each other's company.  Sometimes Rue feels a strange, warm shiver run through her when she thinks about those women, but it isn't like she's going to grow up to be one of them. She's kissed a boy -- Apple, one of the other fruit-pickers, a year older than Rue is.  It was nice; he was sweet, his lips were soft, his hand stole around to the small of her back as if he wanted to hold her there forever. He’s kind and gentle and she likes him a lot, cares about him.  But the thing with Quince... it's just different, that's all. Rue sticks to her like a burr every moment that she can, drinking in Quince's smiles and grace of movement, watching the sun burnish her copper hair until it's shot through with streaks of pure gold. Her birdcalls to the mockingjays are sweetly sung and repeated back in hauntingly beautiful harmonies. Whenever Rue sings to the birds, she's thinking of Quince. Actually, almost all the time she's thinking of Quince.

            Well. After she’s been reaped, Rue knows the odds that she’ll ever see Quince again are a thousand to one.  She’s not stupid.  And even amid the agony of the loss of her parents and her sisters (how will they survive without her tesserae?  Who will look after the children when her father works the night shift and their mother collapses in bed from exhaustion as soon as she's home from work? Who will sing them to sleep at night?), there is a separate, smaller pang of pain at the thought of never seeing Quince again. But Katniss.  Katniss wearing her flames at the City Circle, the fire of her costume no brighter than the fire in her eyes. She's so much like Quince in size, demeanor, confidence, beauty. Rue can't stand to think of everyone she's left behind in District 11, but Katniss is here with her, right in front of her, and Rue knows by instinct that if she just focuses on Katniss, she can get caught up in that whirlwind of rapture and make the memories of home recede for the moment.

            And it's so easy to focus on Katniss.  She's amazing.

            Rue has known she wants Katniss as an ally from the first moment that she saw her, but she can’t let on to Katniss how much she wants to be with her, because she thinks Katniss would think she’s crazy.  Maybe she is crazy.  Either way, Rue waits to ask Seeder about alliances until the evening of their second day of training.

            “I think I’m going to need allies,” Rue says, already feeling she’s in dangerous territory; Seeder can’t know how much she wants Katniss either.  No one can know.  Something in Rue demands that this intense yearning filling her be kept secret. So she tries to keep it casual.  “I don’t think I can do it on my own.  I’m too small.  I don’t know how to get enough food.  I might get injured and need someone to help me.”

            “We talked about this,” Seeder says, a slight crease appearing between her eyes.  “With your skills, you’re best on your own.  You can’t climb high enough, or jump from tree to tree, with an ally.  You know how to feed yourself with plants and nuts and eggs -- you don’t need any help with that.  And your best shot at avoiding injury is to stay out of the way, and you can’t do that with an ally who can’t climb with you.”

            “But I think I could,” Rue argues. “I could stay in the trees if there was any danger and my ally could stay on the ground and follow me.  But if the Gamemakers send in something that attacks the high trees there’ll be no one around to help me if I don’t have an ally.  And I won’t have any supplies leaving the Cornucopia, and if -- someone else did...”

            “Are you talking about pairing with Thresh?  He’s the only non-Career who stands a chance of getting out of the Cornucopia alive with supplies, but you know he doesn’t want any allies at all.  We already asked --“

            “Not Thresh,” Rue says, anxiety beginning to swirl in her belly.  “I know he doesn’t want allies.  But... some of the others might be strong enough to -- they might be able to get stuff at the Cornucopia...”

            “Who are you thinking of?” Seeder says, looking at her hard.

            “I don’t know.  Just... Peeta’s big, he might be able to... and he’s teamed with Katniss...”  Rue doesn’t want Peeta around at all, but she doesn’t know how else to make the argument; he’s the stronger of the two.  “They’re friends, and with three of us, maybe...”

            Seeder’s face has set in a careful, neutral expression.  “I don’t think it’s a good idea, Rue.  The two of them, from the same district, I think they’d naturally turn on you once most of the tributes are gone.”

            “I don’t think they would!” The thought of Katniss betraying Rue is unbearable. But she never would. Rue just knows it.  “They’re not like that!  And I think we’d be a really good alliance.  Peeta’s so strong, and he’s so good at camouflage, which could be really helpful. And Katniss…” Her voice trails off and her cheeks begin to heat up.

            “What can Katniss do?” Seeder asks.

            “She’s really smart,” Rue says, trying to keep the excitement out of her voice. Most of it.  “She’s really good with the edible plants, and she knows how to set snares.  She knows how to build good fires and she’s a good climber and I think she’s a fast runner –“

            “So she has the same skill set as you,” Seeder says, and her face isn’t encouraging.

            “No… I mean…” But now Rue isn’t really sure what she does mean.  “She picks up how to use weapons really quickly.  She got good with a spear today after she trained with it for about 45 minutes.”

            Seeder looks at her steadily.  “Rue, I need you to look at this objectively. Forming an alliance disrupts all the plans we made for how you’ll survive.  Your best hope is to keep out of everyone’s way.  Anyone can turn on you in the arena, Rue.  Anyone.  The best ally will turn if it comes down to you or her.  Remember what we talked about?  If they can’t catch you, they can’t kill you?  If you pick up allies, you’re throwing that whole plan away.  They wouldn’t even have to catch you.  You’d be putting yourself in their hands.”

            Rue looks down at her lap and doesn’t say anything.

            “I know it’s hard,” Seeder says gently. “It’s scary being alone. All of this is scary. But I believe you can make it.  I really do.”

            “Even though I’m so small?” Rue says.  She’s asked this before but it helps her to hear it.

            “Because you’re so small,” Seeder says. “You have a better chance of outlasting the rest of them because you can stay out of their reach while they’re all killing each other.  But that won’t work if you throw yourself into the fight by trying to hold an alliance together.  If you can handle the fear and the loneliness for awhile you stand a chance of coming back to District 11.  To the orchards.  To your family.  Keep their faces in front of you when you start to feel too alone.  They’ll remind you of what you need to do.”

            But Rue can’t do that.

            She tries, she really does, but it’s too painful.  She’s surprised Seeder didn’t know that’s how it would be.  She’s still drawn to Katniss, still finds herself keeping close to her in the arena, even though Katniss doesn’t know it.  But when she tries calling up her family’s faces, it’s like a spear through the heart and she has to work hard not to cry – crying would alert everyone to where she was in a minute. So she has no choice but to focus on Katniss.  Focusing on Katniss is the only thing that makes this bearable.

            Rue wraps her thoughts of Katniss around her like a blanket, reveling in their warmth.  Her speed, her skill – and more than that, her… Katniss-ness.  Her strength, determination, purpose – her fire.  Rue climbs lower down the trees than she should to be able to look at Katniss’s fingernails with their flame patterns.  To study the clean, sharp angles of her profile.  To see the shimmer of polished steel in her gray eyes.  And to look at her mockingjay pin.

            The mockingjay.  Rue thinks of her friend-mockingjays at home, the ones she’s trained to sit on her shoulders and let her stroke their wings.  The songs they sing to each other. Mockingjays mean home to Rue – all the best things about home.  The music, the climbing, the work shifts with Quince looking up at her, smiling.  The mockingjays fall silent when Rue sings to them, and she’s teaching her little sisters to sing to them as well.  Katniss’s mockingjay is a sign to Rue, a sign that she’s someone Rue can trust.  If that isn’t totally logical, Rue doesn’t care.  She trusts Katniss.

            When the firestorm comes along, Rue is terrified that Katniss has been killed, but she manages to reconnoiter around the fire line and find Katniss – badly burned, in pain, but alive.  When the Careers chase her up her tree, Rue is there just a couple of trees away, even though she knows she should be staying well out of the way of the tracker jacker nests sprinkled around this part of the arena.  When things look hopeless for Katniss Rue silently loads up her slingshot, extra stones at the ready, wondering if she could take the Careers by surprise, stir up some chaos down there, and give Katniss a chance to get out – Katniss, with Rue at her side.  But then the Careers give up for the night and the tracker jacker nest is a better idea.  Rue points it out to Katniss and then runs when Katniss tells her to, but a smile spreads across her face, so large and goofy she’s afraid of what the audience will make of it if a camera is on her.  She’s saved Katniss’s life.  Katniss knows now that she’s smart and that she’s on Katniss’s side.

            She watches over Katniss as she recovers from the tracker jacker stings.  She watches her as she hunts with the bow and arrow – all flawless shots.  And finally she can’t stand it anymore, and she steps on a twig to let Katniss know she’s there.

            Katniss wants her as an ally. Rue wants to sing it to the heavens.  Sing it to the mockingjays.

            It turns out Seeder was wrong – Rue knows it immediately.  Sharing their provisions, their survival tricks, their skills; they’re so much better off together than they were alone.  Rue may not be able to stay as high in the trees as she could before, but she has Katniss’ bow and arrow to protect her now.  She has Katniss’s strength on her side.  Katniss will always protect her.

            And the ecstasy of being with Katniss. She knows almost immediately that Katniss thinks of Rue like her little sister, Prim, and she loves it.  She’s someone special to Katniss now, and Katniss cares about her.  It’s evident in every move she makes – her hands lightly grazing over Rue’s shoulders in an affectionate gesture, the way she quickly touched Rue’s knee once as she leaned in to examine the berries.  Katniss gives her appreciative compliments on all the food she’s found, on her intelligence in getting away from the Cornucopia.  They eat together.  Katniss gives her a whole leg of the groosling. Rue has never had anybody treat her like this. She wants it to go on forever, even in the middle of the arena.  Here, in this circle of safety they have drawn about themselves, she and Katniss can be together and nothing can come between them.

            When Katniss tells Rue she can sleep in Katniss’s sleeping bag with her, Rue begins to shiver with a kind of delirious joy she can’t name.  That night she’s awake long after Katniss has fallen asleep, cuddling close to her, reveling in her warmth and her closeness, the regular sound of her soft exhalations, the small movements of her chest.  She can smell Katniss’ hair; it smells of smoke and pond water and pine.  The curves of her body press against Rue.  Rue presses her face into Katniss’ shoulder and hopes the night will never end.

            When the sun rises, Rue looks at Katniss’s sleeping face and knows she will wake soon.  Slowly, barely daring to breathe, she raises her head from Katniss’s shoulder and places a soft kiss on her temple.  She lets her mouth linger there for a minute, feeling the steady pulse of life under her lips.  She closes her eyes and fixes this moment in her memory forever.  Then she draws away and steals soundlessly out of the sleeping bag.  She wants to get breakfast for Katniss.  

            When they work out the plan to destroy the food, Rue is excited – she loves conspiring with Katniss over it, seeing the gleam of excitement in her own eyes reflected in Katniss’ – but she doesn’t really want to leave Katniss’ company.  She pushes that aside, though, thinking of how this will prove what a great team they make.  But soon after Katniss has left, Rue feels her aloneness settle over her again like a shroud, and it makes her shiver.  Something isn’t right.  She goes ahead with the plan, setting the fires, lighting them at the scheduled times, but a sense of dread is rolling in over her now like a thunderstorm and it’s only getting worse as time passes.  She begins to start at every sound.  She doesn’t want to climb out of the trees long enough to light the fires.  Then when she gets to the third one she hears the sounds of at least one Career below her and she freezes to the spot.  She doesn’t think he’s heard her, but she can’t bring herself to move.  What if… what if… and where is Katniss?  When will she come back?  She’s safe with Katniss.  Where is she?

            Finally she hears Katniss approaching – she knows it’s her by the slow, steady gait she always adopts in the woods, her hunter’s walk, in almost inaudible footsteps.  No one else would know she was coming but Rue.  So Rue sings to the mockingjays, and they begin to sing with her.  When she hears Katniss’ voice softly singing back, she slides down out of the tree, a huge grin taking over her face, and begins to head toward Katniss’ voice.  She’s made it.  They’re back together.

            And then there’s the net.  Terror.  Screaming.  Katniss screaming back.  And then the spear.  She doesn’t understand what’s happened for a second.  Then Katniss bursts onto the scene and shoots the Career in the neck and Rue is staring down at the spear in her stomach, and the smell of blood breaks over her in a heavy wave and she knows.

            But Katniss is there.  She won’t be alone.  She’s twelve and she’s dying and she’ll never climb a tree again, never hug her sisters, never sing to the mockingjays.  She’s twelve and she’s dying but she’s not dying alone.  Katniss will stay with her.  She promised.

            She asks for a song and Katniss sings.  Rue closes her eyes to listen.

            A meadow, under a willow.  There’s one like that at home.  It’s the meadow where Rue picked Quince’s bouquet. Rue lets the picture drift up before her eyes – the bright colors of the wildflowers, the grass beneath her bare knees as she knelt to pick them, the tendrils of willow leaves just brushing her shoulder.  _Lay down your head and close your eyes_ , Katniss sings, and Rue imagines lying back amid the soft grasses and wildflowers.  Her sisters crowd around her, and her parents.  Her oldest sister climbs the tree and sings down to her.  The rest curl up around her and cuddle close.  Safe and warm.   

            _Here is the place where I love you,_ Katniss sings, and Rue lets out a soft sigh because she is loved.  By Katniss, by Quince, by Apple, by her sisters, by her parents.  She lets the warmth of their love surround her and feels it begin to lift her up and away.  Away from the pain, away from the fear, away from this bad world where children are killing one another and no one can keep you safe. The light around her grows brighter and it’s bringing her to the meadow in Katniss’s song for real now, the meadow where her head is pillowed softly on green grass and the daisies guard her from harm and everything is kindness and safety and love.  She lets herself float away.  She hopes that those she loves will follow her.

            She drifts away into a field of bright light, and Katniss’ tears fall slowly on her cheeks.

            


	22. Thresh [District 11 Male]

THRESH

_District 11 male tribute, killed by Cato on day 16_

 

On the third day every lightning bolt shows faces in the shadows and knife-edged delirium in the light.  The grass swarms with ghosts.  Voices shriek at him in the thunder.  Cracks to hell open under his feet and knock him over. Mouths of monsters yawn in the mud and suck him into the ground.  His body armor tightens like a vice to cut off his breath.  He staggers through the grass, looking for Cato, finding other people instead. _Work, slug,_  says his line boss. _Nobody’s stronger than you,_ says his sister.  Rue appears with her hands full of pomegranates, sings her four notes, screams and collapses in a heap of blood and dismembered flesh.    _You’ll do it_ , the toothless old man from the silos tells him.  Another lightning bolt breaks the sky open and his mother’s face shines at him through the gap, smiling, then collapses and falls to the earth in a shower of shooting stars.  Fires erupt in the grass where the stars land.  A pit of scorpions appears a step ahead, writhing over each other in poison slime.  Real, unreal? Who knows anymore?

 

Thresh hasn’t slept in three days.

 

When he left the feast he knew Cato didn’t stand a chance.  The backpack, the head start.  He made the grass, tossed Cato’s pack in quicksand, suited up in the armor, settled down to wait with a swarm of carnivorous insects just to the left of him and a pool of white-foamed acid behind him.  Cato came with his sword and spear, Thresh ran at him with his mace and knife.  Feinting, circling, slashing, dodging, and then everything went dark and a bolt of lightning hit the grass ten feet away from them.   They both stumbled back with a cry, and then the first wall of water fell on them and they were drenched.   They fell back from one another, shoving dripping hair back over their foreheads, blinking into the torrents of rain.  Then Cato snapped out of it and lunged at Thresh, throwing his whole body behind it, and the fight began for real.

 

They both had night-vision glasses and no time to put them on, still fighting full-tilt by the illumination of the almost-constant lightning.  Not getting anywhere.  Finally Thresh dodged away and ran around the killer-insect swarm, groping for his glasses and hoping Cato would run straight through them in pursuit, but Cato stayed where he was and when Thresh rejoined the fight they were both wearing their glasses.  The world took on an unreal reddish cast and everything began to bend and distort with the water streaming down the glasses.  Still they fought.  Thresh is stronger but Cato was quicker, leaping over Thresh’s mace or flattening himself to the ground to avoid a slash with the knife.  He threw his spear and it missed Thresh’s neck by a hair, and they both ran pell-mell to grab it.

 

Then Cato disappeared.

 

Thresh thought he was circling, assessing the situation, ready to leap back into the fight if Thresh let his guard down.  But he was gone ten minutes, fifteen, twenty, and all of a sudden Thresh realized what he was doing.  He was sleeping.  The Careers know how to do that, fall dead asleep in an instant and wake twenty minutes later on the dot.  The TV commentators say it takes a lot of training.  It only works if the terrain provides enough places for them to hide.  Like this grass in this storm.  Thresh tore around looking for Cato, only found him when a sword whistled past a half an inch from his belt.  The battle rejoined, more furious than ever.  And then two hours later Cato disappeared again.  Thresh wiped the water off his glasses, then again and again and again, dancing around the traps the Gamemakers had set, studying every blade of grass and every inch of mud for any sign of Cato.  There weren’t any.  And the thought occurred to Thresh for the first time: _I’m fucked now._

 

Still, adrenaline carried him through the first day.  He dogged Cato’s every movement, marking his every step, but nothing seemed to help.  Cato’s fighting had turned defensive, his guard up every second, never leaving Thresh a single opening.  And then somehow, no matter how closely Thresh watched him, he would disappear into the rain like a tendril of fog.  And Thresh knew this was pure strategy – Cato was wearing him out.  Soon Thresh would be running on empty, and then Cato would strike.

 

But Thresh learned determination in a tough school, and he’s worked plenty of sixteen-hour days during harvest.  No matter how much training he’s had, Cato’s had it soft all his life in District Two.  Thresh knows how to fight for his life when everything’s grinding you down. Cato doesn’t know what he’s up against.  There will be one moment when he’ll slip up, and Thresh will crush his skull.  No more Careers then. And every dead child from District 11 will smile in their graves.

 

Thresh made it through the second day.  Stumbling sometimes.  His limbs had  gotten heavy, his reflexes slower. The rain felt thicker than it did before. The mud deeper.  He was getting clumsy, taking a few blows to his armor. He started to nod off occasionally in the breaks, but the thunder always jolted him awake and he’d slap his cheeks and jump back and forth on the balls of his feet, because the second he slept Cato would kill him.  So back to his feet.  Fighting more desperately, shoving his way through Cato’s careful defenses.  Never worked.  Cato laughed at him.  Over and over.  Dancing away from a kick to the groin, a slash at the waist, a swing at his skull.  Laughing.  Thresh never hated anyone so much.  Every time Cato laughed the hatred snapped through Thresh’s head like electricity and he welcomed it because it helped keep him awake.  Hours passed. Biting his cheek for the jolt of pain.  Shrieking into the thunder.  Driving ahead like a juggernaut.  Still awake.  Still awake.  Still awake.

 

The third day he lost it.

 

He started running away from Cato himself, not to sleep but because every swing sapped his strength. Going on instinct.  Falling over more and more often, knee-deep in mud.  The Gamemakers’ traps seemed to have vanished.  Cato and Thresh were the only show now.

 

Then a bolt of lightning hit just feet away from him, and the light parted the darkness and coalesced into a figure.  His grandmother.  She spoke to him in a voice that rang with thunder.  _Remember who you are, boy_.  _Remember where you’re from._

 

She faded away and everything was dark again.  There was one second when Thresh knew what was happening, remembered the commentators talking about the effects of sleep deprivation, about the hallucinations.  Then Cato stormed back into the scene and there was no time for thought. Thresh hardly knew what he was doing anymore, ducking and stumbling and lunging and falling and rolling.  Rolling towards Cato’s feet and trying to pull him down.  Cato’s shouts of laughter.  Still fighting.  Thresh was still fighting.  Suddenly he heard his sister’s voice, in his head and not in his head at the same time. _Fight him, drag him, pull him down,_ she said in a singsong.  _Kill him kill him come back home.  Fight him kill him come back home._

 

Finally Cato dodged away, ran into the rain to sleep.  Thresh fell to the ground. His sister’s voice was still ringing in his ears.  Another bolt of lightning.  He looked up.  White snakes squirming out of the gap in the air where the lightning hit.  He shouted and rolled away from them.  His sister’s voice turned into a drone, _snakes snakes snakes snakes snakes snakes snakes._   The snakes swarmed at him, hissing.  _Fight fight snakes snakes kill the snakes. Snakes snakes Cato Cato snakes._ He lunged to his feet again, stamping on the snakes.  Cato’s a snake.  He’ll kill them all.

 

So everything fell apart.

 

Now the figures surrounding him begin to spark with electricity, fade and reappear like static on a TV screen.  When they fade Thresh finds he’s staggering away into the grass, still looking for Cato. He’s pure fury now, pure hatred.  The storm rages and howls in his head, battering his skull.  He’s swinging his mace over his head, slashing the grass ahead of him with his knife.  He’s a whirlwind of murder.

 

Then all of a sudden, there’s Cato. Catos. Five Catos, all running at him.

 

Thresh stops dead, everything spinning and whirling around him.  All the Catos closing in.  He’s paralyzed for a second.  He could turn and run. Maybe the Catos won’t catch him.

 

Then, behind the Catos’ heads, there’s something like a sunrise.  He looks up and sees Rue’s face in the sky, full of light.  Transparent.  Her eyes wide, lips open as if in a plea for mercy.

 

Rue.

 

With a crazed yell he springs forward, mace swinging.  He picks a Cato and charges at it, every atom in his body screaming for the kill. 

 

It’s the wrong Cato.  

 

A slash of the sword and a torrent of blood, and Thresh is on the ground, his head rolling through the mud.  He has a fading glimpse of the world, turning over and over, his body lying there without a head.  Then, just before everything fades completely, his eyes light on the Rue sunrise above his head.  She’s not scared anymore.  She wears a soft smile and she’s holding her pomegranates out to him again.

 

He reaches out for them, and then everything is lost in her light.   

 


	23. Peeta [District 12 Male]

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This chapter contains explicit discussion of rape and violence.

PEETA

_District 12 male tribute, victor_

 

_I don’t want them to change me in there.  Make me into someone I’m not._

 

Within the first five minutes at the Cornucopia, Peeta knows that was a fool’s statement and a fool’s hope.  Within those five minutes Peeta has already become a person who can stand in the middle of a chaos of blood and screams and dying children and watch it as though it’s separated from him by a glass wall.  It can’t touch him.  And the realization breaks upon him that in those five minutes the Games have already taken away everything he ever knew himself to be.  He’s scraped hollow and the Games will fill him with whatever they choose.

 

But no.  There’s Katniss.  

 

Katniss is his lifeline to his own humanity, and if he loses her, he’ll lose himself completely.

 

So he keeps her with him in every moment, clutching the image of her tight and tighter and tighter and tighter.  She’s in every breath that he takes, she’s printed on the inside of his eyelids every time he blinks.  She’s in the flush of his face and the galloping of his heart.  Her ghost watches him from the shadows. And though he began by conjuring the image of her in her Cinna-made flames in his mind, trying to wrap it around him for warmth, the ghost that watches him is the ghost of an emaciated eleven-year-old girl curled in the shadow of his family’s trash bins, staring at him with sunken eyes that look a thousand years old.  He did everything he could to save that girl once.  He can’t do anything less now.

 

The Careers hoot and holler at him half the night, asking him what she’s like as a fuck, asking him if she put up a fight the first time, if she’s a screamer, if she’ll take it up the ass, if he ever had to tie her down.  They’re fucking with him and if he ever let on how much it tortures him he’d be sunk.  So he just tells them over and over that he’d never touch a Seam slut if his life depended on it, and then he redirects the conversation to a stream of nonsense information he’s made up to mislead them.  He tells them she’s clumsy as hell and afraid of heights, that she can’t climb the rope ten feet in gym class without having a panic attack, that they’d never catch her up a tree.  He tells them she’s good at camouflage and they should be looking for her in clumps of underbrush or in weeds and mud at water’s edge.  He tells them she formed an alliance in training with the Seven girl and the Five boy – numbers he plucked out of air – and now that she’s operating without them she’ll have no idea what to do.  He can’t think up any good explanation for her eleven in training, so he tells them he thinks she was sleeping with one of the Gamemakers, but he’s not sure they believe him.  That’s probably just as well, since he has a feeling that as soon as they get all the information they want out of him, they’re going to kill him.

 

Then he sees her – a tiny flicker of orange light from the Eight girl’s dying fire catches on her face as she hangs there in the tree, limning the curve of her cheek and jaw.  He doubts any of the Careers would even know what they were looking at if they saw it, but Peeta could identify her by an inch of her nose or half of one of her eyebrows.  He tries desperately to steer them away from the Eight girl, trying to keep them from seeing the fire, but it’s too late.  Clove’s on the girl, pinning her, and Cato’s disemboweling her and there’s pleading and screaming and laughter and hooting and moaning and suddenly Peeta’s glass wall has shattered and he feels like he’s on a Capitol high-speed train that just veered off the tracks.  For an awful moment he’s completely disoriented and he can’t tell if it’s Katniss screaming and moaning, Katniss’s blood staining his boots crimson.  Then he’s stumbling away with the rest of them and he sees the real Katniss again, a bit of forehead and the shine of an eye this time, and he knows she’s safe and he hasn’t failed yet.

 

He has to go back and kill the girl to keep them moving.  She’s still scrabbling and convulsing weakly, still trying to collect her intestines from the ground and put them back inside her.  He smoothes her hair back over her forehead and whispers an apology in her ear.  Then he slits her throat.  She’s his first kill.  And he feels himself change again, his soul twisting around this new horror.  He thinks he might throw up.  He wants to lie down on the ground beside this girl and never get up again.

 

Then he thinks of Katniss. And he makes himself get up.  And he gets the Careers moving again.  And they don’t see her.  He’s done what he can.  And it’s something to hold on to.

 

Things get worse.

 

He doesn’t see Katniss again for days, and the Careers are getting to be more than he can bear, with their grotesque bloodlust and cruelty and continual sick teasing about raping Katniss.  He worries that if they find her Cato is actually going to rape her, rape her and then kill her, and he can’t stand the thought of any of it, and he doesn’t even know if he’s doing her any good anymore anyway.  He dwells constantly on the idea of slipping away from the Careers, finding Katniss himself and taking her – where?  Where in this entire arena could there possibly be a place of safety for them?  He knows his only chance to help her is to continue doing what he’s doing, but he feels like he’s about to vomit every second of the day now, and the image of her watching him is intercut more and more often with bloody images of her corpse, dead a hundred different ways, each more horrible than the last.  He’s sleeping badly now.  Hours after he’s lain down in his sleeping bag he stares up at the sky, trying to trace the outline of her profile in the stars like a new constellation.  He lets the outline fill in with the image of her face, and then, eventually, he sleeps. 

 

Then he wakes into the nightmare of the next day and it all starts again.

 

When the woods turn into a charging wall of fire he’s terrified, not for himself, but because he flashes back on the “girl on fire” line and wonders if the Gamemakers cooked this up primarily for her.  He runs like hell and then catches himself hoping fiercely that at least one of the Careers will be caught in the fire and burn to death, and the realization of how much more he’s changed in these last few days hits him like a thunderclap.  When Clove does trip over a root and falls behind he makes himself go back to help her to try to regain some of what he’s lost, but she just shoves him away and he falls down, his chest flat against a burning log, and realizes he still wants her to die, wants all of them to die.  Who is he anymore?  _Katniss_ , he thinks, and it resonates through his skull like an echoing scream, _Katniss, where are you? I need you, you can’t know how much I need you, and where are you? Katniss, Katniss,_ please –

 

-and then there she is.

 

The rush of mingled joy and terror that floods him blocks out sight and sound for a second.  The joy fades away as he realizes how desperate her situation is and how unlikely she is to survive the next few moments.  He’s on the brink of making a wild charge at one of them, trying to draw their attention away from her long enough for her to escape, but there are five Careers and even if three or four of them pitched into Peeta Katniss would be sure to be caught by one of the others. But what else can he possibly do?

 

If Katniss is killed, Peeta decides, he will kill himself.  If she is killed and he is unable to stop it, the change in him would be an unbearable one, and he refuses to try to bear it.  If these are the last moments of Katniss’ life, then so will they be the last moments of his.

 

But somehow, miraculously, there’s a reprieve. And so Peeta stays awake all night under that tree, staring up at the branches that screen her from his view, hearing her move up and down.  Most of the time he has no idea what she’s doing.  But the tracker jacker nest is in his view, and as the anthem begins he sees her begin to saw at the branch.  She’s planning to drop the tracker jackers on them.  She’s planning to kill them all.  Including Peeta.

 

Peeta doesn’t move a muscle. 

 

He’s not afraid; he doesn’t seem to have any fear left in him.  He even feels a small trickle of happiness.  He’s ready to die without a tremor to save Katniss’ life, he’s left all fear of his own death behind, and that’s the first change within himself that he welcomes.

 

When the tracker jackers hit the world gets shiny and bendy within seconds, but as long as he’s conscious he’s crashing around in the bushes, looking for Katniss, trying to ensure that she’s safe, trying to ensure he’s not dying in vain.   And he does save her, this one last time he’s able to save her, and the fight with Cato, the cut to his leg, the wild chase, all of it hardly registers as the beat of his gladness thrums through his brain.

 

But then he begins to stumble as the venom really hits, and suddenly she isn’t safe anymore.

 

Peeta could never have imagined the nightmares that descend upon him with the tracker jacker venom, and he could never have imagined the thousands of different ways that Katniss could die before his eyes.  In his nightmares he’s never, not once, allowed to die himself.  He begs for death, screams for it, prays for it, and it never comes.  There are stacks of Katniss corpses piled all around him, there are abominations performed on her body, dead and alive -- by Cato and Clove, by all of the Careers, by every tribute in the Games, those who have lived this long and those who are only grinning skeletons.  He’s doomed to watch. He fights to get to her but he’s fighting the air.  She dies and dies and dies and Peeta never does.

 

When he comes out of the hallucinations fully he’s collapsed on the riverbank and he’s not sure that he’s not going to die after all.  He welcomes it; the thought of living makes him so tired.  He hides himself in the mud and weeds,  and he traces Katniss’ profile in the mud, over and over again.   He paints her smiling, healthy, whole.  He draws a ring of protection around her and tells her it’s okay, no one will ever hurt her again.  He moves out of the tracker jacker hallucinations and into fevered delirium very quickly, but the delirium is a blessing, because now when he sees mirages of Katniss, she’s well and whole and safe.  She thanks him for saving her life.  She cuddles down with him in the riverbank and strokes his face until he falls asleep.

 

When the change in the rules is announced Peeta isn’t sure it’s real.  When Katniss finds him he’s not sure that’s real either.  It isn’t until she’s cleaned his wound and given him the fever pills that he knows she’s here in reality this time.

 

It frightens him.  He’s supposed to be taking care of her, not the other way around.

 

But then she’s kissing him, and he doesn’t know which way is up anymore, and the change within him this time shocks him to his core.  It’s hope, wild and sweet, a hope he’s forbidden himself all these years.

 

And if he can just hold on to this last change, then everything that has happened in the Games will have been worth it. 

                                 


	24. Katniss [District 12 Female]

KATNISS

_District 12 female tribute, victor_

 

Mid-spring, and all the windows in the house are open, letting the scent of grass and flowers in on the breeze.  Katniss still hasn’t gotten used to having fresh air at home.  It took years for the tinge of smoke to leave the air of District 12, but it’s gone now.  Things have changed.

 

The wind ruffles the pages of the textbook Willow left on the kitchen table.  Looking over, Katniss can see at a glance that the sheet of homework next to it isn’t half filled out.  “Willow,” she calls in exasperation, flipping through the unmarked worksheets.  Willow had sworn her homework was done when Raven came over to play.  God knows how deep in the woods they’ll be now.  Willow never took to archery, but she loves the wildflowers.  And the hiding places.  Her father’s long-unused talent for camouflage has come through in his daughter.  It’d take an hour to track them down.  Katniss picks up the messy pile of homework, counting up the undone assignments, and then the breeze flips another page of the textbook and she freezes, eyes glued to the page.

 

It’s a history textbook, and this chapter is about the Games. 

 

Slowly, as if mesmerized, Katniss traces a finger over the margins of the page.  At the top there’s the familiar Games logo – the sword crossing the olive branch, THE HUNGER GAMES printed across the spot where they touch.  Katniss wants to throw the book at the wall.  She wants to attack the book, rip it to shreds.  She wants to douse it in gasoline and light a match.

 

Instead she pulls it toward her and looks at it more closely. 

 

Spanning the open pages is a collage of faces – tiny faces.  Faces of children, teenagers. Most of them totally foreign to Katniss.  Who are these strange children?  Then Katniss’ eye catches on the smaller heading underneath the Games logo:

 

THE TRIBUTES OF THE HUNGER GAMES

 

Katniss’ eye skips to the bottom-right of the photos automatically, looking for the picture of her child-self there.  Hers and her husband’s.  They ought to be the last pictures there.  They were the last victors of the Games, the victors of District 12.  Instead the picture is of a child she’s never seen before.  A boy with the familiar Seam look about him, olive skin, gaunt face.  She leans closer to see the tiny writing below the picture.  KEM RONLEY, DISTRICT 12, it says.  SEVENTH HUNGER GAMES.

 

Then Katniss notices a fold at the edge of the page.  It’s a foldout.  She pulls the next page out. And the next.  And the next. And the next.

 

There are ten foldout pages, covering the full length of the table. They are all covered with faces.  Children’s faces.  Faces upon faces  upon faces, some of them blurred and difficult to make out in their tiny boxes, but still they’re clear enough to distinguish this one’s determined jaw, that one’s too-big ears, this one’s hollow cheeks, that one’s furious glare.  Clear enough to see that they’re people.  Kids. So many children, and nearly all of them dead, all these not-yet-mature faces clapped in wooden boxes and laid in the ground, frozen in time. Katniss runs her fingers across the slick page, as if she’s in a trance.

 

Thousands of faces, all staring up at her now.

 

Katniss forces herself to breathe deeply, to clear the sudden panic from her mind, the panic that she still feels, all these years later, when the Games spring at her from out of nowhere.  She’s safe from the Games now.  Peeta is safe from the Games.  Her children are safe from the Games.

 

The problem is that the pictures show her children who were not safe from the Games, whose only safety came in the grave.  Around a couple thousand of them she thinks, whatever 24 times 74 is, but Katniss has never been good at mental math and she has never worked this sum out precisely, never wanted to know.  But these faces press on her urgently, each one smaller than a postage stamp, but still real, each one a real child.  A child who lived once, and the only thing Katniss knows about the vast majority of them is that they all died at the hands of the Capitol and went to their graves before they were nineteen.

 

They all had lives, these anonymous dead children, and no one except perhaps a few scattered family members knows anything about them.  The Games showed everyone how they died, but never how they lived. Their deaths were the show that people watched and the only record of them that was saved.  Katniss has tried to teach her children differently.  The book.  The book with its pictures and stories of Prim, Finnick, Cinna, Rue, and so many more; her book in which she records the lives of people whom the Capitol tried to reduce to their bloody ends, the people whose love and legacy the Capitol never could kill after all.  There is joy in that book, joy that lives alongside the sorrow, everything mixed up and messy because that’s what it means to be human.  She has the book, but the book records the lives of maybe a hundred people that she knew and loved.  And how incomplete is that alongside this profusion of pictures?  This history book attempts to honor them, and Katniss supposes this is better than nothing, but at the end of the day, how much good does it do?  Pictures or no pictures, it’s their deaths and not their lives that matter to the world.  Who could ever write a book big enough to contain them all?

 

Katniss was complicit in this when she was sixteen, because it was the only way to survive.  How could she have lived through the Games at all if she let herself care about the other competitors' lives?   Twenty years after the Games, this is still a door inside her that she has never made herself unlock – there are so many of those still.  She never wanted to know and there were so many other things to focus on, so many other things to make peace with before she could feel whole again.  But now their lives are overwhelming her, and she finds herself wishing that she could know these people at last, because every child whose face carries no meaning except its own death is a victory for the Capitol.  Clove, who killed a half-dozen children with practiced skill – what made her laugh, what gave her joy when the knives were stowed away at the end of the day and she had gone home to her family?  Was the Ten boy born with his lame foot or was it an injury, and who took his arm to steady him when he stumbled?   Thinking about it, Katniss catches herself, pulls the book close to her in a fierce motion and bends to study the page.  The Ten boy was Tarin Culler.  She looks at the other names, searing them into her brain.  Acacia Allen, the girl from Seven, with all that red hair – did she like the flame-tongue of her hair or did she yearn for blonde ringlets?   Did Claudia Mill from Six have any siblings?  Even Rue, who Katniss knew best – what did she dream of at night, what was her favorite color, what boy did she have a crush on, what was her favorite song, what games did she play when she came down out of the trees?  And what life would she have lived if she’d been allowed to grow up?  What lives would any of them have led without the Games?

 

Katniss knows this is pointless, ruminating on what could have been and never was.  Reality is enough to deal with. More than that, it’s the only thing you can deal with.  No matter what the horror, eventually you have to accept and move on if you don’t want to be eaten up by it.  And she’s learned, finally, that there is no disrespect to the dead in continuing with your own life.  In fact, the only thing you can do for them is to live in a way that honors them.  To try to make sure the best of them is not forgotten.

 

Katniss will never know the faces in these pictures, never know the best of them or anything else about them either.  But perhaps she can live in a way that will honor them anyway.  They were part of the Games – but what was best and most important about them was lived outside of the Games, and their lives, not their deaths, are what made the fight worthwhile.  Katniss scans their faces and promises them that she will not forget.

 

Then she hears Peeta at the door, his distinctive slight limp.  “Anybody home?” he calls cheerfully.  Katniss looks back at the book, not sure what she’s going to do.

 

Then, as he comes in, she closes the book, pushes it a little bit aside.  “Peeta,” she says, and reaches up for a kiss, then an embrace.   He smoothes a piece of hair over her shoulder, plants a light kiss on the top of her head, and then starts to move away, but she buries her face in his shirt and pulls him close, listening to his heartbeat, feeling the strength of his arms around her.  It takes a long time for her to let go.

 

“Something wrong?” he asks her when she finally lets him move away.

 

She hesitates for a moment, then shakes her head.  “No,” she tells him.  She knows she’ll have to talk to him about this sometime, probably tonight as they lie in bed together, but she doesn’t want to get into it now.  She picks an abandoned worksheet off the table.  “Willow skipped half her homework to go play with Raven.  I have no idea where they are now.”

 

Peeta makes a face and riffles the undone homework pages with a finger.  “Of course she did,” he says in a resigned way. “What do you want to do?  Ground her?”

 

“I guess,” Katniss says, and groans.  “She’s going to make us miserable all week.”

 

Peeta laughs. “We’ll just have to find some alone time,” he says, his voice lightly teasing, and he kisses her ear, letting his mouth linger for just long enough to make sure Katniss gets his meaning.

 

She laughs herself.  “Later,” she says.  “Can you call Raven’s mom and see if they’re over there?  Oh, and call Jack’s mom, too, and ask her to send Logan home by 6. I was about to start supper.”

 

Peeta makes the calls and Katniss begins peeling carrots, and she lets the pictures slip away from her for the moment.  This is what she’s been given, this ordinariness of husband and children and cooking and sleeping. She fills it with love, writes in her book, calls the children home, peels the carrots. She goes on, breath by breath by breath.  This is the life she is living.

 

From the back of her mind, the faces tell her: _Make it worth it._

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thanks so much to everyone who's read this, everyone who's left comments or kudos or who's just been following along. Writing this has been a really interesting experience and I so much appreciate your coming along for the ride. <3


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